What games are you playing now?

Well, I made it past Horizon last night in ME2. Did not like at all how the mission was forced on me. I wanted to do some loyalty stuff and the Firewalker (or some such) DLC. Now I think I'll just try to do all that stuff and other DLC as soon as possible before another mission event gets forced on me. Definitely disliking the reduced freedom in ME2, but at least each location appears to be better crafted unlike the generic buildings/mines on unexplored planets in ME 1. And the character animations seem to be better. Am missing the mako-based exploration; planet scanning is not nearly as fun. Strangely, not missing the shitty inventory from ME1, which was a chore. At least combat is a bit more fun in this one.
 
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Joined
Aug 18, 2008
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LoL like crazy. Wish I had a team to play with though because most of the times playing with randoms is a pain…
I used to play it very actively too(my max elo rating was around 1450 not much but not bad either).I now play only few games a week and sometimes less.Very good game from gameplay standpoint but as you said playing with randoms can really be pain.
 
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Playing Dragon age 2, got it cheap. 2H male warrior. About 5 hours in?
Not going to bother with any DLC.

One caveat with voiced protagonist, its a chore if you dont like the voice though...
Dont mind being in a city or the different storytelling. a little change now and then refreshens, and i like being a mercenary hoping for a better life, nice for a change.

The fights are ridicolous though!
Fu@@ing anime/hentai tv show with ugly weapons and enemies dropping from the skies!
I´ll give it some hours and see.

Reinstalled ME3 cause I got the urge to "mabye" play the DLCs.
Enjoyed my first playthrough very much but I will probably not replay it completely again.
Reminded me of the limitations the worthless and ancient hardware in consoles have on the experience we could have with PC gaming (animations limited because of memory space, one button madness, low FOV etc)

What I would give for a Sci-Fi space opera like ME1 again!
I want to drive around in a landing vehicle looking up at alien skies and finding ancient secrets!
(well, on my third playthrough I were rather tired with the mako..)

C
 
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"Star Wars - The Complete Saga" - the Lego game.

Anyone knows how I can play it with my keyboard ? I still have problems getting along with it - and there was of course no handbook included ... *sigh*

I really want to enjoy it, but this game was very definitively made for non-keyboard users in mind ...
 
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Playing legend of grimrock right now and I think my dungeon crawling itch has been satisfied even though I haven't finished it. Gets very monotonous after a while.

Debating whether I should pick up Dead Island or Game of thrones rpg.

I'm also playing the dawn guard dlc but I didn't find the story very captivating. I'll have to finish it one of these days though.
 
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I'll say that while Dead Island isn't close at all to being an rpg, I had a total blast with it last year. I enjoyed it enough that I'm sure I'll be picking up the sequel at some point next year. Game of thrones I haven't played as of yet, I've heard both good and bad things about that one.



-Carn
 
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Still playing XCOM on classic difficulty. Fun game, but I'm almost convinced the AI cheats. It seems like nearly every time one of my squad members gets hit, it ends up being a critical that kills them instantly. There's no way I could ever play this game on Ironman mode.
 
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A game of Dwarves rocks. It mixes the underground sandbox fun of Dungeon Keeper with the mining exploration and survival of Minecraft, it's fun as hell.

Started another mission, basically you have a Dwarven kingdom, and you have to mine away to create it - but it's also an entire ecosystem simulation that will collapse if not managed properly. For instance, I had dwarves down mining away in the depths, who found a lot of gold and other precious jewels/metals. Well, why not have 3 more dwarves down there? And 3 more warriors just in case they stumble upon enemies?

So i upgraded my summoning portal, and brought in 6 more dwarves. Within 5 minutes, my community was about to collectively fall over dead from starvation since my new members threw off the delicate balance between production and consumption. Even my king was starving, and if he dies -game over. Then we mined straight into a lair of giant spiders….

It wasnt pretty. But in the end that's where the fun lies - bringing your kingdom back from the brink of destruction, now w/ some badass warriors and a little more wisdom on what NOT to do.

The pics below are my miners toiling away on some much needed gold and tourmaline they found in the depths. Some of the behaviors of the Dwarves crack me up, you can see one of the workers in the first shot stopping to drink some ale! Then, the progress on my throne room. One shot is my king just chillin out on his throne earlier in construction, then later on with one of my crafter dwarves working on a suit of armor decoration behind the throne as my king was getting off his fat ass for a stroll. Probably to go eat something!
 

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Joined
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Oblivion is just phenomenal.

So far I've done Knights of the Nine, 99% of the Mage's Guild quests (on the very last quest now), close to half of the Fighter's Guild, half of the Thieve's Guild, and plundered random tombs for loot, and spent a total of 160 hours so far in the past few weeks.

Awesome game. So much content. I still have all those guilds plus Shivering Isles to tackle, so I see myself spending at least another 50 hours finishing this run. I'm smitten with this game!
 
Still playing Eschalon Book 1 at the moment; it's fun, but on the whole I probably enjoyed my time with Avernum: Escape from the Pit a little more as far as indie titles go. I also want to start the full version of Knights of the Chalice, but will need much more free time to do so. :)

To endeavour to quench my thirst for cosmic terrors, I've also decided to have a peek at Dead Space 2, which I picked up for $10 recently. Again, need more time to test it for longer.

Briefly on the the ongoing ME debate: I enjoyed the party building and generally the social heavy nature of ME2, but overall the first game was the tighter and more quality experience with for me, the more interesting morality oriented role-playing choices on offer.
 
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- but ME is clearly the best of the bunch! :)
lol no
(except for that loyal Soldier black dude - he was pretty good and plausible)
The point of soldier black dude was that he was more-or-less the only "normal" character on your team and he worked well as such. The whole squad of such characters would be dull.
Oh, and the less said about Mordin Solus the better.
Yep. He´s the best Bioware character bar none, nuff said :).
It was even worse in DA2 and ME3.
If you dislike ME2´s characters for their "edginess" and "extremeness", I don´t see how ME3 is worse.
I found characters like Liara, Tali and Garrus much more well-rounded and more like ones you could actually encounter.
If you´re talking about ME1 iteration of these, you found wrong ;).
These three have barely any personality whatsoever in the game, Tali especially is barely anything more than a walking codex entry. The best characters in ME1 are Wrex and Ashley.

———————————————————

As for what I´m playing right now, I just finished Dishonored, another game that is worse than Mass Effect 2.
The setting, characters, story and even art direction gradually dawned on me as boring and level design + gameplay mechanics, though competent, were not good enough to keep the game entertaining alone.
I´ve played the game ghosting + "no kill-ing" everything and the support for such play style was lacking - not enough variety in powers and not enough variety in challenges/scenarios. I´ve played the game only on hard, but I doubt playing on very hard would change anything (at least it didn´t for the one mission I´ve played through on that difficulty).
The powers included I´ve played with (blink, bend time, possession) were fun and fairly unique, but there was only that much I could do with these on a stealthy non-lethal run.
The game has better, a lot more varied support for lethal approach, which I consider a minus, especially in a game where general play style has major influence on the narrative. Should´ve been 50/50.
On a more positive note, I appreciated the general speed of "stealth-ing" in this game, that was a breath of fresh air.

A few more specific notes:

I think a game like this should really come with a more robust dialogue system, the interactions with NPCs made it feel like I´m playing a 5 year old and made connecting me + the player character + narrative difficult.

One of the first tooltips told me that killing stuff will lead to a darker ending. WTF.
Speaking of which, low/high chaos changing some hostile encounters and minor narrative bits was cool, but letting general play style affect the main narrative in a binary manner was not an ideal design choice in my opinion. I´d prefer some specific choices (like killing or sparing a target) to do the job instead, or in conjunction with the chaos system. As it is, taking full advantage of the available arsenal of powers and gadgets means getting a crap ending, which I consider an unwelcome design contradiction.

Level design was mostly good and I´ve felt it presented different "paths" generally in a somewhat more organic manner than DE:HR.

Quite a lot of stuff felt like it exists in the game "just because" - the Outsider, the "surprise" twist and, well, pretty much the whole setting :).


All in all, in some ways the game was a positively unique experience for a while, but overall I was not amused as much as I´ve expected.
In a sequel I´d mainly like to see a setting and narrative with more depth, more RPG elements and more symmetrical support for various play styles.
 
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Didn't we finish our ME debate? Or was that someone else. I'll be the big man for once and refrain from retorting :)

Well, except that I'm not surprised that Bioware found its audience somewhere. Not unlike most modern TV shows (24 being a good example) - there seems to be a massive audience for that kind of edgy and implausible "let's desperately provoke an effect and reaction" nonsense.

That said, I'm finding myself in agreement with your Dishonored assessment. Particularly the bit about being surprised how it turned out, because I also expected a lot more. I stopped playing it, actually.
 
Just picked up Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams.

If you've played old school platformers like Mega Man, Ghosts n' Goblins, and Battle Toads, the difficulty rests pretty close to that, except it's a lot like Mario in that you have only one hit and you're dead. While there is a rare powerup that gives you a second hit, it's rare, and it doesn't help against pixel-perfect jumps.

Difficulty is tamed, however slightly, by unlimited lives and frequent check points.

Made it to the first world's boss, which actually gives you the super crystal for some help when you restart the fight after dying. Pattern is basically Armored Armadillo from MMX1 (snes). Except you have no way to stun or weaken this thing, and of course no ranged attacks at all. Given that that was one of the toughest bosses for me to bring down without the correct weapon back in the day, needless to say I'm having troubles.

Controls are fair, keyboards suck at platforming, but I borrowed a logitech controller and it's pretty tight with that. Red headed sister's dash ability tends to be wonky though. It's multi-directional, but oddly defaults to an upward angle, rather than straight ahead. It also doesn't always detect if you're holding up, right/left, or down and doesn't dash in the direction you want it to roll.

Graphically, it's beautiful, with lush, detailed stages that alter when you switch between red head and blonde. Some traps and paths are only available to one or the other. Each has their own special ability, the aforementioned Dash and a 'Twirl', which lets the blonde basically double jump then slowly fall/glide down. I end up preferring the Dash, as it destroys enemies when you dash into them.

Stages are relatively linear, with some alternate paths and secrets. Mostly in-line with the genre here. Music is good, with each PC having their own music, but there only seems to be the one tune, and it get repetitive after awhile.

All in all, I think it's a good game for those whole like the challenging platformers of the old consoles. Just get a controller though. Keyboards don't do well at platforming on a good day, and certainly not at this level of difficulty.
 
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Jun 28, 2007
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Playing Lord of the Rings Online again, for hours and hours.

Rolling a lv24 Hunter named Tigerius around the southern Barrow Downs outside Bree if anyone wants to do some hunting, look me up on Firefoot server
 
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Oct 18, 2006
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Recently there have been a lot of RTS games played in our group, especially Supreme Commander 1.

Supcom1 is probably the peak of basebuilding in RTS history. It's not just that it have loads of upgradeable buildings, it's also that the game have "adjency bonuses" which means that buildings may benefit from being placed next to another. Primarily construction buildings benefit from being surrounded with resource production buildings and resource production buildings benefit from having resource storage buildings. But both production and storage buildings are volatile so a crashing plane or a well aimed shot will create a chain reaction that may take out the whole base if you are unlucky, therefore you need to protect your clusters of buildings. How you place the buildings in your base becomes something like an artform. While there are better or worse strategies, even the best strategies have it's weaknesses. After an hour or so you are likely to have a protected base with a good resource production and then you can begin to build experimentals that takes ages to build but are the toughest units in your arsenal. Supcom1 have made sure that these units are rare, extremely expensive and very powerful so it's very rewarding to have your first rolling (or flying) out of your base. This creates a great diversity which makes repeated playthroughs against harder and harder AI's enjoyable and we play it in COOP with up to 5 players.

Supcom1 seems to be the peak because after that basebuilding in RTS becomes obsolete. I didn't spend long with supcom2 because for some reason it have oversimplified the basebuilding making it feel like moving back to Warcraft I. Adjency bonuses are removed so you can just drop your buildings. Upgrading buildings are removed so the choice of using your building at a low tech to protect yourself or upgrade it early to get powerful faster is gone (and it feels there are much fewer buildings to construct). Instead of upgrades you have a science-meter that grows the more science facilities you have that allow you to place points in a talent tree. This basically feels like spending points you get for free with minimal effort required.
 
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Jammy Dragon is a Facebook city-building simulator. The game starts with playing a series of flashed images that illustrate the back-story of the game
 
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Just finished LOTR: War in the North, which was an amusing little action RPG. I played as the Dwarf and had lots of fun chopping up Orcs.

After much delay, finally moved onto Fallout New Vegas. Using Skavenhorde's list of recommendations as a menu, plus a few additions, my modlist is:

Main game+all DLCs (Ultimate edition)
Mission Mojave (which is the main NV unofficial fixpack)
Darnified UI (I liked the FO3 version)
CASM (save game manager)
Delay start of DLCs
Increased wasteland spawns (more critters to go with the lower XP progression, see below)
A World of Pain (lots of new locations, enemies and loot - again should be balanced by lower XP gains)
New Vegas Bounties 1 and 2 (bounty hunting quest fun)
Increased durability mod (weapons etc don't need repairing so often)
No auto-aim mod
2 times slower levelling mod (not as severe as the mod I used for FO3 due to slower vanilla levelling+higher cap)
Lots of tweaks from Puce Moose's tweak and balance center, such as reduced ammo+chems, deadlier combat, tougher economy, rude awakening etc. Somewhat worried about how hard AWOP and NV Bounties will be with these tweaks, but what the hell - better too hard than too easy methinks.

Going with vanilla graphics as I did with FO3 - I may get sick of the orange as I did with the green, but at least for the first playthrough I'd like to see the game as the designers intended.
 
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Aug 12, 2007
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Englandland
Giving ME3 another chance after DeepO spoke warmly about it. It's not as bad as I remember, but then again - I was prepared for the atrocious running animations in the initial sequence this time.

But WHY OH WHY can't I holster my weapon? It's driving me insane.

I deleted my ME -> ME2 savegame in protest over how awful ME3 turned out to be. Silly me - I would have liked to experience a full playthrough after all.
 
The worst parts of ME3 so far? Long unskippable cut scenes and occaisonally ludicrous insipid writing, and shitty cover controls. The best part? Better looking environments, more character build choices (than ME2), tedium of scanning gone, weapon upgrades are back, faster paced combat.
 
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