Here you go, the second installment of "Games Tom's Guide is Playing This Week". Last week we got into "Control" and two "Legend of Zelda" games: "Breath of the Wild" and "Skyward Sword HD. Since all of these games take quite a while to complete, we asked three other staff members what other games keep our intrepid tech journalists glued to the screen.

The latest game to get our attention is Microsoft Flight Simulator. Finally available on the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S after being PC-only for so long. But more than that, this time I'm into older games: 2018's Shadow of the Tomb Raider and 2012's Persona 4 Golden. It's not uncommon for me to catch up on my backlog of new games, even though there are so many new ones out there.

Read on to find out why these games are worth your time and whether you want to tackle them before the big fall release season begins.

Piloting an airplane is not like riding a bike; this was the third (or was it fourth?) time I crashed a Cessna 152 in training mode while trying to land in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.

I play the game on an Alienware Area 51m with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU. So far, everything is very smooth, but I am anxious to see the performance gains from the latest game update released last week.

When I am not crashing into the ground, I am simply amazed at the realism of the game. I recall someone saying that Flight Simulator is the perfect pandemic game. You can even have the current live weather rendered, which adds to the authenticity.

And it's not just the outside world that's great: I've marveled at the texture and shading of the marbled plastic molding in the cockpit when I'm banking an airplane.

I'll probably need more time behind the controls before I approach competence - I wouldn't recommend starting with a Boeing 747 - but there's going to be a lot of fun to learn. - Mike Prospero

You are the new kid in town in Persona 4 Golden, the high school sim-slash-dungeon crawling RPG I've been playing since February of this year. And while I could have beaten P4G by now, I'm glad I took the long way to the end. No, I'm not aiming for a complete route (as far as I'm concerned), but I'm glad that unraveling each piece is a very calming and regular respite. It also takes time, as the HowLongToBeat.com rating for this volume is 68.5 hours, which is almost a good rating.

In part, I'm working slowly, which is the main thing P4G does on my Twitch stream, playing two hours every weekend day of the game as I watch the characters grow over time. My best friend Yosuke is slowly learning to stop putting his foot in his mouth, my potential love interest Chie is becoming more outspoken and less clumsy, Yukiko is finding her own path, and I'm starting to see the game's characters grow more and more like me.

All this character development, of course, occurs as the high school students in Inaba (a quiet little town in Japan) try to solve a series of haunting murders. This is, of course, carried out through a television screen in the local shopping mall, where they are taken to a strange reality where they collect and battle monsters like Pokémon.

"Persona 4 Golden" is a 2012 game, the graphics are a bit dated, and the characters can feel a bit regressive, especially as they deal with issues of gender identity. Ultimately, however, it is a complex and intricate game that has me grinning the whole time. It reminds me of the old corny joke that ends with the phrase "You can't eat all these pigs at once". Persona 4 Golden is a PS Vita classic that is finding a new audience thanks to its recent Steam release. - Henry T. Casey

Yes, I know I'm late for 2019's Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the conclusion to the reboot trilogy that began with 2013's Tomb Raider. I played and greatly enjoyed the first two games, but deliberately put off playing "Shadow" until I was ready. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the first games to utilize a physics-based lighting system called ray tracing, which makes content look more realistic and realistic. The only problem was that it required Nvidia's new 20 or 30 series GPUs. I was using a GTX 1080 Ti, but decided against upgrading to the RTX 2080 Ti, which is more expensive in my opinion.

Rumor had it that Nvidia would release a 30-series GPU in 2020, a new card that would be more affordable and perform significantly better than the 20-series. What I did not know was that the chip shortage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic would lead to a mass frenzy of resellers, buying up all available inventory and "rustling" it up at enormously high prices. Finding a new RTX 30 series card at a retailer became a never-ending purgatory of refreshing the Best Buy website or waiting for hours in front of a microcenter for one to arrive.

Eventually, I was able to get my hands on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Shadow of the Tomb Raider miraculously ran at full 4K on my LG C9 OLED with all ray-tracing effects turned on. The way the water refracts the glow of the flames and the faint flickers of light bouncing off Lara's skin are truly worth seeing. Not only that, but all of these effects in 4K are running at at least 60 frames per second.

The game itself doesn't change much from the previous two titles, but that's not a bad thing. The same stealth violence and gunfights as in the past games are still present, and there is plenty of rock climbing and daring acrobatics up to a mile high. Despite the series' fantastical cacophony, it's a fun summer blockbuster. - Imad Khan