What games are you playing now?

I just finished X-BTF and before continuing with X-TENSION Im playing BIOSHOCK. Gonna finally play it with my new vista64 rig all maxed directx10. Last spring I played through both previous 'Shocks so Im fully prepared to continue the Shocking Experience (tm) series.

For control Im thinking of using gamepad. Som games have pretty decent controls for gamepad and its always more comfortable for gaming than mousie&keyboard.
 
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For control Im thinking of using gamepad. Som games have pretty decent controls for gamepad and its always more comfortable for gaming than mousie&keyboard.

Some games do indeed have good control schemes for gampads, but I'm not sure how many people would agree with the second part of that statement. I know I definitely feel more comfortable with keyboard and mouse.
 
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Some games do indeed have good control schemes for gampads, but I'm not sure how many people would agree with the second part of that statement. I know I definitely feel more comfortable with keyboard and mouse.
I thought so too before but nowadays I have started to like xbox360 controller more and more. Perhaps because it can be used from multiple positions including the lazy sofa instead of just sitting on a chair. Thats the main thing I meant with comfort anyways.

Bioshock doesnt really impress me much at all. I.E the character faces look old after mass effect. Also SS1/SS2 felt like a much better game right from the beginning.

But Im tired and I have just began it. Somtimes it takes more than that to really start a game.
 
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What did you use for X-BTF, keyboard +mouse or flightstick? I have a copy of BTF, as well as X2 and X3, but I've never gotten around to playing any of them. I'm mildly interested in them, even though I'm not a big fan of that genre. I've never had the time to play them on the side, and I've heard they're really long.
 
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I played through X-BTF laying on the sofa with keyboard on my lap. I didnt need mouse or joystick (even though I just bought logitech wireless). The game works best with keyboard alone imho.

I started the game like two weeks ago. Played it on 5-6 days until I finished so its not that long. Depends on how good you are in making money. Just buy speed upgrades from pirate stations as soon as you can. And other engine boosts. It really speed ups the game. There is som travelling in the missions.

X-BTF is a very open game but it has a real plot that comes in the end with typical space shooter kind of missions. You can recruit other races to your cause, buy merceneries or just equip your own ship. X-BTF plot continues in the next games so its nice to play it from start.

The important thing is to put up factories as soon as possible. They will crank up money automatically and its a joy to visit them every now and them and notice they have made like half mil of extra spending money.

X-TENSION (the addon to X-BTF) is better game though. Its more like a sequel than addon. X2/x3/x3 come after that. I havent tested them with just keyboard though (apart from X-TENSION which seems to work with just keyb too).
 
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Just started Two Worlds. I wasn't impressed after playing the demo a year ago, but after finding the collector's ed on ebay for 99 cents I figured I couldn't go wrong.

First impressions are that it's terribly unpolished, but that figures after playing The Witcher. The world has what I call "The Wizard of OZ" effect - a very dream-like atmosphere, or something out of someone's wild dream. I like that. Morrowind had it as well, and despite that game's flaws it kept me enthralled for hours. Maybe Two Worlds will be the same.
 
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Got Tomb Raider:Underworld for xmas, playing it right now.

This one is not sitting well w/ me. For one, the performance of the game itself is quite poor. The last two, both anniversary and legend ran fine on default settings, yet w/ this one I'm going thru turning everything down/off, still it just doesnt run well. It's also making me dizzy, which none of the tr's have ever done. The combat sucks. The save system sucks. Lara stumbles after jumping short distances for some reason and fumbles, gets stuck, and has weird little seizures where she flails wildly. The game looks good, but I dunno if that really counts any more - there's no excuse for a game from anyone who's worth a second look to be anything but good looking these days.

It's a little more freedom than the last two, at least seemingly they make the linearity a little more transparent w/ some different handholds n stuff that arent just a bunch of mysterious trapeze poles out in the middle of nowhere.

I havent grown to dislike it yet, actually now I'm getting further in the game and it seems to run a bit better now. I hope the trend continues!
 
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Hey Sammy, have you tried Assassin's Creed yet? The reason I ask is because it has a very similar style to Tomb Raider, but the controls are much more dynamic and fluid, the way TR's should be. It also has great combat and a large free roaming map. I think it would have you purring. ;)
 
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The game looks good, but I dunno if that really counts any more - there's no excuse for a game from anyone who's worth a second look to be anything but good looking these days.

One would think that there is more than just looking good to good games ... ;)

[edit] I don't want it to seem I'm hassling Sammy - it is more the way in which the continued upwards spiral of art asset costs and focus on HD-everything has gradually eroded the quality of the actual gaming experience in so many cases. I've not played the new Tomb Raider, but stuff like Far Cry 2 is a good example, and the hunt for added bloom did nothing good for Gothic 3, which generally has run worse than Crysis for me ...
 
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Just started Two Worlds. I wasn't impressed after playing the demo a year ago, but after finding the collector's ed on ebay for 99 cents I figured I couldn't go wrong.

First impressions are that it's terribly unpolished...

Two Worlds gave me a bizarre experience, mostly thanks for being one of the most unbalanced games I ever played. Towards the end of the game I had hundreds of skillpoints, but maxing out firemagic costs 15 points and that's enough to defeat every opponent in the game. I died like 10 times the first day I played, but at the end of the game I had 99.50% combat rating. Due to alchemy I jumped from like 1000 mana to 25000 after a few drinks. Then there's monsterbalance. The majority of the monsters go down in a single spell, several at once per fireball. Then there's "tough monsters" that insta-kill you if they get close but can be picked down on range with 3-4 fireballs.

I had some fun out of the game, mostly thanks for me liking freeroaming games, but there are better titles on the market.
 
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Got Tomb Raider:Underworld for xmas, playing it right now.

Except for some frustration because of a camera looking in the wrong direction, TR:U have been enjoyable for me so far. It's far less frustrating than TR:A, and continuing the story of TR:L is the important thing for me.
 
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I'm not playing a lot during this Christmas break, which is kind of strange. Well, maybe not.

However, all of a sudden I felt the urge to play Half-Life and I gave into that feeling after a short while. I'm playing it with forced anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. I'm not sure if the latter actually helps, but AA in older games look pretty cool. Heh.

Still haven't finished RA3, and the list of games that I intend to finish just keeps growing.
 
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I think that you misunderstand me, Mike. I agree wholeheartedly w/ you, too many game makers these days are putting pretty graphics before a genuinely good game. I lament this as much as you do (well maybe not, since you play scores more games than me) and for the same reasons. I cant play a pretty-yet-vacant game any more than the next guy can, and I dont want to have to upgrade my system every 3 mos because the sys reqs are thru the roof yet again.

I dont consider myself a graphics whore, but I do expect at least passable graphics in this day and age, and anyone w/ any kind of reasonable budget is going to be able to tack on at least reasonable graphics. What passable constitutes is different things to different people of course, for instance I consider Gothic and Morrowind to still have good 3d graphics. I consider Baldur's Gate to have good 2d graphics. I have a great time playing all these games, I'm not about to dismiss them on account that theyre using dated technologies. But I'm also not stooping down (in my opinion) to play some Spiderweb game that looks like some poor NES port or something. I dont care how good you tell me the story is, I couldnt care less, I cant get into it. On the other hand, I wouldnt pick up Crysis (not really into shooters anymore), a game I have zero interest in, because it supposedly has teh cutting edge. You couldnt get me to play Crysis any easier than you could pay me to play Return to Krondor.

A lot of my appreciation of games is exploring, and being part of the virtual world put before me. If it just doesnt look interesting and at least a bit stylish and absorbing, I cannot bring myself to take it seriously and invest my time in it. Sometimes I can let it go w/ some quick lunch break cheapies or something, but nothing that I'm gonna sink my weeknights into, that's for sure
 
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Hey Sammy, have you tried Assassin's Creed yet?


Nope, sure havent, but Ive wanted to try it. Tomb Raider Underworld has gotten way better. First levels ran horribly, but as the game's gone on things have freed up quite a bit and the dizzyness has subsided.

I'm starting to really get into it now, but from what I hear the game's quite brief so it may all be ending rather soon, I think I'm at least halfway by now
 
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I dont consider myself a graphics whore, but I do expect at least passable graphics in this day and age, < snip> I consider Baldur's Gate to have good 2d graphics.

I guess I see Geneforge 5 being on par with Baldur's Gate in terms of graphics. I'm playing Arcanum now and the graphics are little better than BG and the pathfinding movement is jarring ... but it matters little to me.
 
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I wouldn't give Geneforge 5 quite that much credit. I think the graphics are pretty "clean" for what it is, but it doesn't have as much detail as BG,- especially in the outdoor environments.

I understand what Sammy is getting at though. He doesn't mind gameplay over graphics, but he doesn't want to play something new when it looks like something from a Decade ago.
 
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I wouldn't give Geneforge 5 quite that much credit. I think the graphics are pretty "clean" for what it is, but it doesn't have as much detail as BG,- especially in the outdoor environments.

I understand what Sammy is getting at though. He doesn't mind gameplay over graphics, but he doesn't want to play something new when it looks like something from a Decade ago.

I guess it is where you come from. I didn't play BG 1 & 2 until late '03, early '04. Prior to getting back to RPG's with NWN coming to the Mac in summer '03 I was really a graphics whore, tweaking games for maximum settings and so on. Immersing back into RPG's means taking a significant graphics hit - with few exceptions they look much worse than FPS ... or in general look like FPS from 2-3 years prior. So for me it was already a step back, so I was able to just say 'I'm here for the story / gameplay' and actually mean it 100%.

There is nothing wrong with saying "I prefer graphics to gameplay / story". Just don't blame someone else for what is your own choice. Because it is not really possible to simultaneously support indie RPG's while also demanding graphics that costs millions of dollars and many people to create (even if it was several years ago), and claiming to support gameplay over graphics. There are too many dependencies ...
 
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I guess it is where you come from. I didn't play BG 1 & 2 until late '03, early '04. Prior to getting back to RPG's with NWN coming to the Mac in summer '03 I was really a graphics whore, tweaking games for maximum settings and so on. Immersing back into RPG's means taking a significant graphics hit - with few exceptions they look much worse than FPS ... or in general look like FPS from 2-3 years prior. So for me it was already a step back, so I was able to just say 'I'm here for the story / gameplay' and actually mean it 100%.

There is nothing wrong with saying "I prefer graphics to gameplay / story". Just don't blame someone else for what is your own choice. Because it is not really possible to simultaneously support indie RPG's while also demanding graphics that costs millions of dollars and many people to create (even if it was several years ago), and claiming to support gameplay over graphics. There are too many dependencies ...


There was a time when RPG's did take a backseat to other genres in graphics, but I really don't think that's true to a large degree anymore. More modern crpgs such as Oblivion, Gothic 3, and Fallout 3 come very close to matching the best graphics of games from any other genre. Even Morrowind when it was released in 2002 had what was, at the time, amazing graphics for any game, regardless of type. Today the difference is marginal at best. RPG players no longer have to settle for anything less than average in that department.

As far as the "I prefer graphics to gameplay / story" comment, I haven't seen that said or implied by anyone here. Just that it's nice to be able to have them all.
 
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Even Morrowind when it was released in 2002 had what was, at the time, amazing graphics for any game, regardless of type.
All those that ran out to buy a new video card so they could see the pretty water, raise your hands.:shakefist:
 
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Finally started MotB, but it's not holding my attention. After JemyM showed me the hq3x filter for DOSBox, I've been playing some Ultima VI.
 
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