What games are you playing now?

Just finished Warhammer 40k: Dark Crusade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000:_Dawn_of_War:_Dark_Crusade

Possibly the best RTS I've played. Really enjoyed it.

txa1265 said:

I have heard that if you don't have a good sense of direction you can end up with loads of inadvertent grinding to the point of making the end battle too easy ...

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Maybe. FFXII follows a different design from what I am used to, both from FF games and other RPG's. More than everything it reminds about a MMORPG rather than a singleplayer rpg. The areas are huge with monsters respawning over time where you can run over the landscape to gain experience to kingdom comes if you like. Instead of gaining money out of kills you get loot which you must sell but sometimes you can also use the loot so it's a matter of what you need and what you do not need.

Like previous games you have two kinds of experience; Experince which gives you levels and LP which you use to buy abilities with. You also have gil (money). To get xp and lp you kill monsters, from monsters you also get loot which you sell for money. Now the game depends alot on what your goals are. Are you trying to do everything in the game? Do you try to grind 3 characters or all 6? If you balance out your characters you will get LP very quickly, so quickly that halfthrough you will have more LP than you need to buy all the best abilities, but even if you do that your moneysupply is terrible. It's quite difficult to keep more than a few characters upgraded with the latest equipment. In all games I usually end up almost capping the credit value, while regardless my amount of grinding in FFXII I always end up short.
Finally levels depend alot on if you try to balance your characters or not. If you use three characters all the game through they will have many more levels than what they would if you try to balance all six.

Despite the major boost in LP I have felt the game to be very well balanced so far. I think that a gamer with less experience with gaming will have more problems with it being difficult.

Tomb Raider - Centaur battle

Tough fight, the hardest battle so far in the game. All the health pack loot up to this point has been in preparation for this battle! I ashamedly had to check the walkthru for how to beat them, I must have run and jumped around in circles for an hour, wittling away at them with my weapons, dying over and over again in the process. Finally won tho, actually got them both "stoned" at the same time once, it was pretty cool.

Lara's Mansion -
This part was pretty fun, took me like approx 2 hrs to complete.

Put in a short replay of Hexen 1 and Deathkings. While I'm finally approaching a high level of proficiency in Hexen (no losing my way in sublevels anymore etc.), DK still manages to surprise me after all these replays. Only today I discovered a secret door I had never seen before .

Picked up Medieval II: Total War - Kingdoms last night. Truly a monumental expansion pack and any Total War fans that haven't bought it yet should be burned at the stake. Uh, just kidding...

Took me an hour just to decide what campaign to try first - it's a unique game for each one, complete with different rules besides different units. I finally decided to play Lithuania. The Teutonic Order definitely matches my favorite style of play (heavily armored Calvary and Infantry), but in this case real-life history had a bearing on my choices of gameplay. I deplore the hypocrisy rife in the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, and so therefore chose to do battle as the moribund Lithuanian pagans trying to defend their homes.

The campaigns are each a work of art, with a noticable difference in atmosphere for each. The Teutonic campaign almost takes on a sort of fantasy, Lord of the Rings type of atmosphere.

In short, It Rocks!!

@Jabberwocky-you lucky mofo. out here in california we've gotten hosed three days in a row. not a single place is going to have it 'til tommorow...though the've been saying that for the past 3 days. this is only the 3rd game this year i've been pining for on release day--oh the torture.

Add to my PSP pile Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, Dead Head Fred and Dragoneer's Aria.

On and off the DS pile was The Settlers, which was crap.

Still on the Puzzle Quest demo--the closest thing to heroin in the world of gaming(other than WoW, I guess) It figures the only demo that's made me want to instantly buy the game is the one I can't get. At least it is announced for PC though, unlike some of the other handheld titles I wish I could play.

I'm playing Clyde's Revenge .

I feel your pain, magerette. Went thru the same addiction. I'll be snapping that one up on release day, which I just don't do much anymore.

@ dte: Isn't it about time the new shiny appeared? Labor Day is looming.

re: PQ--can't find a release date yet anywhere either.

Woohoo ! I've managed to get Ultima 8 up & running under DOSBOX !

A new (old) age has dawned upon me !

Next try : Ultima 7.

finally got kindgoms. i'll be loading it up later and signing away my free time for the next 2 months. i probably will start with americas campaign and play the native americans. land of the free and home of the braves indeed.

Yeah it was kinda weird how I got my copy of MTWII Kingdoms... I hadn't heard an exact release date, just the end of August. I checked Tuesday (the standard new release day, and the last one in August) and Best Buy didn't have a single copy. I went to Gamestop on Wednesday and they also did not have any on the shelf. I concluded it wasn't released, but just on a whim asked the clerk about it. Turns out they had one copy in a drawer! WTF? A brand new release in a drawer? That's a good way to sell stuff . Heh, I probably got someone else's reserved copy and now they are saying "WTF??"

Anyway, I've been playing as the Lithuanians, and I've found some pretty bad bugs... Units don't always run when you tell them to, and setting seige weapons to "fire at will" makes them not work at all. I almost lost a battle entirely before I figured that one out.
I have campaign and battle difficulties set to medium. Even at those settings, playing as the Lithuanians is pretty unforgiving. The Teutonic Order is overwhelming, and it usually takes 2 of your units to kill one of theirs. I think I will have to restart the campaign and readjust my tactics.
I'm also anxious to start playing the Americas campaign as the Apachean Tribes. It's another civilization that doesn't suit my style of play, but will be somewhat nostalgic given the fact that I live in the heart of Apache territory. I already noticed they got the character names all wrong. Oh well...

txa1265 said:

On and off the DS pile was The Settlers, which was crap.

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I assume you have a review coming up for this, but what was crap about it? The premise is very appealing to me (I love city builder type games), so the Settlers for the DS was one of the games I was looking at as a checkmark for the do-I-buy-a-DS-column.

Gallifrey said:

I assume you have a review coming up for this, but what was crap about it? The premise is very appealing to me (I love city builder type games), so the Settlers for the DS was one of the games I was looking at as a checkmark for the do-I-buy-a-DS-column.

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It will be in the next handheld article, and I have just submitted to GamerDad but it isn't live yet. Basically the controls performance and stability are all terrible. Really terrible ... enough that my review was 1 / 5 stars.

Puzzle Quest is the one game I'll get the moment it's published for PC, too. And if it isn't, I'm going to unpack one of the handhelds from our store. It was the second demo which made me buy a game ASAP (the other one was that of RotH back in '96, played the demo and ordered the game the very next day).

Nethergate
Majesty

I haven't had a lot of time to play. I have just started Nethergate, and Majesty is a game I keep going back to.

Depths of Peril : A new hack'n'slasher with a nice twist to it. You have to fight other covenants (read:teams) for supreme control of the town.
Still playing Battle for Wesnoth as well.

@Pladio: I enjoyed playing the Depths of Peril demo and intend to check out the game when it gets released. It's got a lot of layers to it with the covenant angle, even though it's a simple enough premise.