What games are you playing now?

Dishonoured - enjoying very much after many, many, many, many, many hours of skyrim

I've been stuck on the final boss in Torchlight since yesterday. It's ridiculous how disproportionately hard he is compared to any other battle in the game. I'm a level 32 Alchemist playing on Hard, and the best I've been able to do is get him down to about 75% health.

I'm playing Grimrock, on level 12 and running out of food. Hope I can finish it.

After a long time I spent a whole evening gaming.

I tried Faerie Solitaire (free on Steam, you have to collect it within the next couple of days though). After a somewhat slow start it becomes really addictive. I must have played between 40 and 50 hands. So far it seems like one of those games you can play as harmless entertainment, with only mild challenges, for endless hours.
For free it's definitely worth a shot, and even the usual couple of bucks for this type of game are fair.

After that I bought Dead Island GOTY. It's installed now but I haven't tried it yet.
Up-to-date info for our German members: Dead Island was never released here. The BPjM first put it on The Index, Liste B (heavy gloryfication of violence -> which means nationwide confiscation through a court order usually follows when somebody "with a reasonable interest in it" requests it) but later reconsidered and only put it on the simple Index A (selling and buying is legal, but people under 18 must not have any contact with the game or advertising for it -> confiscation usually doesn't happen resp. would be complicated).
As of now activation via Steam is no problem if you have an EU key. To be safe you can do it after 23.00. US keys don't seem to work without a proxy.

While Dead Island installed I played Splinter Cell: Conviction.
The gameplay and story(-telling) reminds me a lot of Max Payne 2. Of course there are differences, but that's the general direction. Instead of bullet time Sam can (and should!) use hand to hand kills. One of these enables an execution shot on a few enemies.
There's less sneaking than I expected. Many situations can only be solved with violence.
Very nice game. Highly polished, intense action (no respawning, the usual set pieces), unfortunately no free saving. Controls with the mouse are fine. The game works in offline mode once it has been bound to a UPlay account. (This is not the case for many other Ubi games!) I set UPlay to offline + no cloud and then told my firewall to block both UPlay and SC:C. The game still worked correctly.

playing 2 pretty good games.
First off, playing an Engineer in Torchlight 2, running around w/ my ferret killing stuff. It's good for what it is.

A more uncommon game is occupying the rest of my time, it's a unique little title called "A Game of Dwarves". Basically, it's a dwarven kingdom sim. Think DungeonKeeper meets Dwarf Fortress. I'm only a couple hours in, but thinking this is going to be up in my all time faves. The concept is just so cool, I'm making my own little underground dwarven empire! I'm a sucker for this type of sim.

Doom 3 wasn't really a true Doom game to me. After playing the original Doom, Doom II and Final Doom to death, Doom 3 was a disappointment to me. I'm sure if I played it today I could probably get over that and enjoy it for what it is, but back then I wasn't that into it.

Currently playing Oblivion and having a blast. It's one of those games I completely forgot how good it is. About to start the Shivering Isles expansion.

Originally Posted by xSamhainx
A more uncommon game is occupying the rest of my time, it's a unique little title called "A Game of Dwarves". Basically, it's a dwarven kingdom sim. Think DungeonKeeper meets Dwarf Fortress. I'm only a couple hours in, but thinking this is going to be up in my all time faves. The concept is just so cool, I'm making my own little underground dwarven empire! I'm a sucker for this type of sim.

That sounds like a really fun combo

I just finished my first playthrough of Borderlands II. A pretty fun romp so far, better story than the original! Looking forward to my second run through of the game and getting to level 50.

Originally Posted by Fluent
Doom 3 wasn't really a true Doom game to me. After playing the original Doom, Doom II and Final Doom to death, Doom 3 was a disappointment to me. I'm sure if I played it today I could probably get over that and enjoy it for what it is, but back then I wasn't that into it.

Same sentiments here. When I replayed it two years later, it was an overall better experience. I quite liked it for the game it was, for how they played with the player's expectations, for the nifty little details. But it definitely was not Doom, at least not for me. Atmosphere-wise, they did a lot better with Quake IV which was very much like Quake (II) in my books. I didn't like several things about QIV, sure, newer games always do that to me - but the discrepancy wasn't as visible as with the Doom reboot.

Dragon's Dogma on ps3. Excellent party based rpg. Lots of quests to do in big open world. Intelligent party members, unique combat system, some interesting unique quests (not all but some) like "catch the thief" etc. I bought this for 30€ and it was way better than I thought. Addon and sequel is in the works so the game has done well.

Also played dead island on ps3. Thats an excellent zombie game.

still playing A Game of Dwarves, building my underground dwarven empire.

Been putzing around with the Walking Dead facebook flash game also. It's pretty lame actually, but if something involves destroying zombies then I'll give it a shot. I dont have any firearms yet, so I'm running around clubbing them w/ a bat. You can only do so many missions before your "energy" is out, and you can either wait - or you guessed it, BUY more. You can of course buy better weapons too, etc. You can do scenarios from the show, but you need to have enough "supplies" to do the mission. Which you have to get by doing side missions, which cost you energy. I'm not paying for anything, probably play it a little more tho just to see how far I can go.

On the other hand, the free browser flash game Universal Monsters Online is kinda intruiging. It's a MOBA style game, think DOTA with the classic Universal Studios monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, etc as playable characters. This sorta came out of nowhere. I love the classic monsters, so I jumped right in and gave it a shot. You can only use what monsters are free at the time, unless you want to start buying them, which i dont. Today Frankenstein was on the roster of free monsters, so i used him. I did okay, but eventually fell behind and spent more time on the respawn point instead of playing. Definitely something to play around with a bit more.

Back to playing a lot of EQ 2, since a new expansion is coming out next week. Still the only mmo worth playing, imo…..well, this and EQ 1. Vanguard is decent as well.



-Carn

Finished (first of probably several playthroughs) of Dishonored - just excellent!!

Just started Game of Thrones. Some nice things but clunky combat and strange choices for controls. Interesting how different unreal games can be

For some inexplicable reason I had to think of DA: O for days (well, mostly of Alistair, to be true). When I fired it up today after not having played in at least a year or so, I did what every well-behaved gamer would do and installed the latest patch … only to discover that I now have access to all the DLC that didn't install for some reason last year (looks it was due to a glitch in my game's version). Which means that I'll be playing DA: O-addons for a few days before returning to Skyrim's Hearthfire.

On my second run through of Legend of Grimrock, I'm am playing a solo Toorum on normal difficulty. Lots of dodging required and very practical with Toorum's thunderstruck trait. Timed puzzles are also a snap. I've maxed swords. For a funny video on what it's like to be a Toorum speed freak, look at this:

Insane Attack Speed

King's Bounty: The Legend. Nah, not my kind of game. It starts off pretty decent, it's even fun for 4-5h, but it gets very repeative and dull. I like the art/design and the music was also pretty good (though the combat music gets on my nerves after hearing it the 100th time). Even more dull than HOMM and it's already pretty dull (but imo, more fun).

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. A game that has been in my backlog for a really long time. really great game, loving every minute. You know it's a good game when you're smiling or even laughing when you die

Civilization5.
Playing it on normal feels too easy. Okay, it's not my first civ game so I just know what to do, I'll try with other settings.
There are some differences with other sequels, nothing revolutionary though. Can't say for sure if it's a step back or step forward…
Some things are utterly silly. I'm rushing the technology (got everything possible before stepping into 20th century) but simply couldn't make things even faster - whatever I've offered to NPC opponents for tech exchange in any turn since the game start, they've just refused. Also NPC opponents don't seem to "calculate" what wonders they should get quickly, most of wonders that are not very useful in the long run they grab as soon as possible, while no brainer musthave ones I managed to get without too much thinking. Should I add that I was on the same island with two NPCs and both of them declared a war on me although per statistics the game could check my army - I had about 5times more forces than both of them combined almost all of the time!
While the victory can be achieved through several possible means, in the end I won by sending the spaceship (game registered that and gave me 5 achievements) and opted to play one more turn and then I won in the same turn with the UN vote (game didn't register this as another victory but I had to reload to grab that achievement). Okay, I'm not playing for achievements, but I wanted to see what epilogue will be displayed. For whatever reason I didn't save the game upon building UN, so I can't go for other victory types now as UN vote is practically mine and I'll win before I, for example, destroy every NPC opponent (and I can do it quickly, they're all still on muskets and I'm equipped with nukes and stealth bombers on the other side).

In the end, the game is simply not fun enough or that normal mode is just not challenging enough. Or I got lucky?

There is another thing that's bothering me. The overall design feels like it's trying to be compatible/playable on consoles and smartphones. Yuck.

I finished my LoG Toorum run and started Mass Effect 2. I am a bit ashamed and feel stupid for how much I spent on DLC when the base game only cost $7.50. :/

Dial back your expectations after playing Mass Effect, and you might be ok with ME2. Just don't expect any improvements in the way of gameplay or you'll be sorely disappointed.

No inventory. Now that's innovashun!

LoL like crazy. Wish I had a team to play with though because most of the times playing with randoms is a pain…