What games are you playing now?

Appearently, to get the best ending in Final Fantasy X-2 I need a 100% completion which I can only get if I defeat the strongest monster in the game in the bottom of a 100 level optional dungeon.
To even stand a chance I am strongly encouraged to have level 99 on all characters, so no way was im going to finish the game this weekend. :(

Tomorrow it will be a full day grinding my characters.

Besides that dungeon and that boss I only have a tiny little end dungeon to finish before I can finish the game. Very annoying since I really want that perfect ending.
 
Joined
Oct 26, 2006
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Currently playing these;
Stalker (pc) - quite different so far
Heroes Of M&M V (pc) - looks good, not keen on the combat
NWN modules (pc) - forever installed, never tire of trying mods.
Brain Games (DS) - brain needs massaging so I go here.
Gorf (Mame) - bring back good memories.

Probably playing a different five or so games by this time next week.
 
Joined
Jul 19, 2007
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I just finished the game Odium also known as Gorky 17. For a game that's almost 8 years old I'm amazed a) that it played flawlessly and b) how much fun the turn-based combat was. The story was decent for a sci-fi horror game but 90% of the game is spent in turn-based battles which are loads of fun with different weapons and strategys to combat the very diverse range of mutants. Figuring out the mutants resistances is fun too and makes you constantly have to devise new strategies otherwise you'll end up paralyzed and then burned. Any death in the part means game over. The voice acting isn't great but its not bad either and at least your three main charcters one american, one french, and one polish seem to all be voiced accordingly. The banter between them can be quite funny if not riduculus at times. I only got to level 9 on each character and the stats are not the most important factor in the gameplay so its really rpg-lite in that aspect. The adventure aspect is also light in that their are no real puzzles just keys and switchs. The graphics really fit the setting well and each of the battle scenes is a unique setting divesed from wherever you are in the game so that really has a nice immersive quality. Give the demo a shot if you like a good sci-fi horror story and/or if you are looking for some great turn-based combat which requires zero twitch skills. Short though at under 20 hours. You can get the game off ebay for around 5 bucks including shipping! The game ends in a cliffhanger though and while just looking up if their was a sequel I came across a prequel Gorky Zero (Aurora Watching) released 3 years ago apparently. Just got done playing with the demo and this is a high quality stealth action game (sorry turnbasers). Lots of cool items and should definately appeal to fans of games like thief, hitman, and deus ex. There's zero rpg to it but there is an isometric view toggle and lots of cool items to use, hacking, moving bodies, etc. The rolling attraction device looks pretty cool. Looks like I'm going to have to import this which means i'm unlikely to get to play it before bioshock. Oh well this has definatley got me in fright mode for bioshock.

Odium(Gorky 17) http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/odium/download_2543512.html

Aurora Watching (Gorky Zero) http://www.gamershell.com/download_11063.shtml

at the rate of release though I'm going to have to wait 2 more years for the sequel:(.

The developers also developed Archangel, interesting game but fairly unremarkable. And the recent Infernal which i only played part of the demo but had been meaning to buy not realizing who developed it. But since that got published by Eidos maybe there's hope of a nice budget for a Gorky sequel.
 
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May 26, 2007
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Meanwhile filing all of my PC games, I dug out my CD-ROM version of Elite Plus.

Its copy protection is only rivalled by the original (and first) Micro Machines game :

Elite Plus has dark-red text on not-so-dark-red background.

To say I have slight problems reading it, is an understatement.
 
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I finally managed to finish Dark Messiah this past weekend (after only six weeks of playing it on and off :biggrin: ). Liked it. Especially the great level design and art direction but also the physics and slomo adrenaline kills. Nice action romp all around though I doubt I'll ever go back to it for a replay.

Then played the Supreme Commander and Overlord demos. Not overly impressed by both games though they seem to be nice enough for me to keep an eye on any expansions and subsequent gold/platinum/whatever editions. One day in the distant future when any such bundled versions will have dropped to bargain bin price is when I will try to remember these demos and consider picking them up.

I'm now playing Tomb Raider: Anniversary which seems to be great so far. I'm still in Peru (after the T-Rex though) and have also finished the Croft Manor (first thing I did in the game). It's definitely a very challenging game. To find all the artifacts and relics and to find out all the secrets of the Croft Manor takes quite a bit of skill, patience, concentration, alertness and even some mad leet brainz lol :biggrin: . Well, luckily there's Tomb Raider Chronicles to make up for any lack in any of the mentioned traits :) and I did in fact have to resort to that site's TRA guides section a couple of times already to figure out some of the secrets. Anyway, it's a nice change of pace from the mindless run'n'gun (or run'n'hack) Dark Messiah. Looking forward to keep playing the game tonight...
 
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Oct 18, 2006
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I wasn't too big on Dark Messiah ... well, at some point my review here will be published and you'll get to see ;)

Loved Tomb Raider: Anniversary, felt that the tweaks in controls and engine over TR:Legend made it even more PC friendly.

I'm still tooling around in Gods: LOI, NWN on Mac and just started the preview of The Chosen – Well of Souls (formerly Frater).

DS & PSP I'm just fiddling around replaying Etrian Odyssey and Puzzle Quest respectively waiting for my next bunch of review stuff to hit ;)
 
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I recall the game name Odium, think I even have a demo on an old computer game magazine disc around here somewhere. After your write-up, Curiously, I feel inclined to take another look at that one. I'd never heard of Aurora Watching, though.. Looks interesting, another to take a look at I think.

TXA, I'm a bit surprised you said Anniversary had control and engine improvements over Legend. I played through Legend and loved it, and it was easily the TR game with the best controls to date. I played the demo for Anniversary and found it to be a step back, so I wasn't as keen on it.
 
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I've been playing through Gods:LOI a few times. It's a fairly short game, but it's got turn-based combat and I enjoy the early game trading sessions. You need to trade foodstuffs and such to be able to afford weapon and armor upgrades. The interface could use some work but it's definitely worth the $20 price tag. It's got a really stupid ending, think along the lines of NWN2.
 
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TXA, I'm a bit surprised you said Anniversary had control and engine improvements over Legend. I played through Legend and loved it, and it was easily the TR game with the best controls to date. I played the demo for Anniversary and found it to be a step back, so I wasn't as keen on it.
I found the Legend engine needing optimization, it didn't perform as well on PC as it should have, showing clearly that the PC target was an afterthought. I also found context-based control faltered too many times. In Anniversary the engine looked as good but performed much better, and I found the frustrating context-switches less frequent. I know the demo section probably had more of these examples from what I've heard, but I liked the overall feel of Anniversary better than Legend - but enjoyed both!

Saw crpgnut on the Gods:LOI forum ... thought he was going to get flayed for a minute for expressing constructive criticism ;)
 
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I found the Legend engine needing optimization, it didn't perform as well on PC as it should have, showing clearly that the PC target was an afterthought.

I have to fully agree with Mike here. I had quite a bit of stuttering and graphical lag with Legend playing it in next-gen mode. Did you maybe play it in regular mode, Gallifrey? That would explain why you had no issues because the problems only occurred in next-gen mode AFAIK.
I know that it was not my system. I even got that stuttering (short freezes) in indoor locations where it just shouldn't have happened since there was pretty much nothing to render or calculate and it even happened when I was standing still in one place.
Secondly. I had a really annoying controls issue in the beginning where my keyboard lagged like crazy. Pushed a button and the action would be executed 10 seconds later. Turned out that the game executable was running in high priority mode for some weird reason. You could work around this by ALT+TAB'ing out of the game and by setting the priority to normal manually but that got old pretty fast since you had to do it every time you started the game. And the input lag didn't completely disappear either. There was still a tiny little bit of lag left that wasn't very helpful in the more difficult parts of the game. Coupled with the performance issues it outright sucked to be honest.

Anniversary on the other hand is definitely a lot more polished. No performance issues, no input lag, no wrong task priority settings. It just works and out of the box w/o a patch at that :) . My only gripe is missing mouse wheel support in some parts of the interface (I hate it when you scroll the wheel and nothing happens) and the still not 100% optimized 3rd person camera. But overall it's pretty impressive how good this game is working without a single patch released so far. Haven't had that experience in a looong time.
 
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Well that sounds incouraging. What I had noticed in Anniversary after Legends was that aiming seemed to be trickier, and there were a couple of other quirks that I don't recall at the moment, which seemed smoother in Legend.
I will have to re-consider Anniversary, now, which is nice since I loved what was done with Legend, giving TR a new, better, lease on life.

Moriendor, yes, I played on regular mode. I tried running in "next gen" mode and the game looked and ran like crap (my computer is rather on the aged side). In regular mode, Legend ran wonderfully and looked excellent, and I had no issues with performance or input at all. It was actually an enjoyable Tomb Raider gameplay experience for once!
 
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...

I'm still tooling around in Gods: LOI, NWN on Mac and just started the preview of The Chosen – Well of Souls (formerly Frater)

I'll be interested to hear what you thought about The Chosen. Your reviews usually tend to jibe well with my own experiences. Speaking of which, noticed your handle in the testing credits for the Nethergate demo--and wondered what your thoughts were? This is my first Vogel experience and it really isn't at all what I expected.

I played a few hours of the demo yesterday, and I have to say I'm still ambivalent. I like the tongue in cheek humor, but not the overall feel. The game has charm, and most of that is due to the story/writing. It has functional if not extravagantly great combat. The movement dynamics are awkward but learnable, but the layout and design is distracting and clunky. It's not the simplicity of the graphics, which are of course minimal as is only to be expected. It's just the tiny map, itty bitty character models, crowded, constricted feeling dungeons, and that huge inventory paperdoll on the other side being useless and taking up all the screen space. I'm probably spoiled from playing more mainstream big budget titles, but a lot of Indie games seem to look a lot better than this. I can barely see what's going on in the overland map.

Ah well. There's always Titan Quest if I want to glut myself on a graphical smorgasbrod. ;)
 
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I'll be interested to hear what you thought about The Chosen.
This is a bare-bones preview version - no voice acting, dialogue that looks machine translated (example - "he give ceiling price", instead of 'he paid the ultimate price') and so on. But it will be an interesting look at things.

Speaking of which, noticed your handle in the testing credits for the Nethergate demo--and wondered what your thoughts were? This is my first Vogel experience and it really isn't at all what I expected.
Yeah, it isn't too bad, I never played the original, but this has a nice setting and humor and possibilities, but is my least favorite Spiderweb game to actually *play* thus far.
 
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This is a bare-bones preview version - no voice acting, dialogue that looks machine translated (example - "he give ceiling price", instead of 'he paid the ultimate price') and so on. But it will be an interesting look at things....

That's pretty rudimentary translating O_O, but hopefully something they'll address. I just ran by the official site and couldn't tell what the inherent language flavor is --I know Russian seems one of the hardest to get right. I really like the artwork on this one though--it gives it some individuality amidst all the smaller dev arpgs that are assailing us at the moment.

AFA Nethergate--I may try it again and see if I can get past that silly looking paperdoll(which retains a beard even when you have your female characters selected :) ) I really do enjoy the way the story is presented, the random encounters and the whole POV. It's a nice change from mass production anyway.
 
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That's pretty rudimentary translating O_O, but hopefully something they'll address.
In the write-up I got there were numerous caveats - basically saying this is a *gameplay* preview, and that they have stripped all voice acting which will be replaced with English actors, and also put in rudimentary subtitles just to keep hte story flowing, but that would also be replaced.
 
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Rather you than me with something like that, unless I was getting paid big bikkies!!
 
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Aug 31, 2006
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Should be no surprise but I have now started Final Fantasy XII and im currently working myself up the first levels while learning the new system.

Wow this is different from earlier FF games. It is still a FF game, it have the familiar ingredients such as talking cactuses, the rideable Chocobo's, the improved magic such as Thunder becomes Thundara that becomes Thundaraga, but the combat mechanics is revamped from scratch.

The exploration and combat remind me about Gothic, KOTOR, NWN2 or maybe even a MMORPG. Random encounters are gone. Monsters walk around in the open and can be attacked on sight and you can even spend some time planning before you attack. I find myself running over dunes chasing wolves for XP as this was any traditional european/american roleplaying game. No more wiggling the analog stick until the screen flash into a random encounter. This makes combat far more fun and far less annoying.

Gone is also "My characters to the left, the monsters to the right, we are taking turns", everybody instead bash eachother in realtime and instead of having to assign actions in combat every turn you program your allies AI, alot like what you do in Baldurs Gate.

The character system is alot more open. It's a welcome return to see a five slot inventory system as FFVII/FVIII/FFX and FFX-2 was terrible with only 2 slots. It's also welcome to see that I can take my characters anywhere I want without going through a razor sharp "this character will always be your white mage, this character will always be your heavy hitter" party-role system like previous games were. While some characters have advantages such as more speed or more magick I am still allowed to take the characters in any direction. I can make everything from a rear white mage to a full frontal heavy-hitter or tank.

I can already tell that I am going to love this game. It helps that the story is well told.
 
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Oct 26, 2006
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Oh boy, I see another 10\10 on the horizon from Mr Generosity.

:D

I don't think he claims to be objective or using his full 0-10 scale ... he loves these games and is revisiting that love. No biggie ;)
 
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