What game are you wasting time on?

Wasting time with Sleeping Dogs. It's kinda fun to hit people in the face with fish and then go sing karaoke afterwards.
Solid, fun game with slightly distracting technical issues. Combat is fun so far - lots of kung fu style action. Shooting is also quite satisfying popamole.

 

Wasting my time with Mark of the Ninja; also been replaying Deus Ex and Bloodlines w/ Camarilla mod for the first time.

 

wat

The stone gargoyle boss in Blood takes a shitton of missiles to take down. The following normal stone gargoyles in later episodes take like 3 alt-fire shotgun blasts tops.

 

Right now, I am experimenting with Chaos Dwarves in Blood Bowl. Mostly against the AI so I can test out skills, tactics, and their overall toughness. So far so good but I still don't feel confident enough to win in the GOG Blood Bowl league so I am just playing to smash as many people as possible

 

Did you play on Extra Crispy? I did. They take the identical (or undistinguisheable from identical) amount of pain. I am playing SW on No Pain, No Gain now. Here they (mini-bosses) don't. So here is your difference.

 

I moved this last week, so not playing much. Internet still not on, joining the local hipsters with a coffee to write this.

I booted up a few oldies I had in GOG DRM free editions, because of lack of interwebs.

Splinter Cell - Still holds up IMO. You kind of have to ghost because the combat is so awful and grabbing guys from behind so unreliable, but that doesn't make the stealth bad. Kind of the opposite in a weird way. Graphics are ugly by today's standards but far enough along in 3D development to be perfectly serviceable. Having Georgia be the enemy is amusing to me since I have actually been to the country. Their entire war plan was probably devised over some torched pork and cha-cha vodka gulps.

Deus Ex: Invisible War - Yes, yes, the bastard of sneaky first-person RPG-likes. It's a rather shite game but can still be enjoyable if you go in knowing what it is and what to expect. I like the arcology and WTO ideas, even if the tech couldn't portray them well. I like the dark and harsh look of everything. I'm in Trier now about to head to Antarctica and it only took me five and a half hours, which is laughable. Whatever, there are very few of these games in existence and it's worth the eight hours to muddle through. Man those fucking constant loading screens though...

GTA3 - Had this downloaded from Steam, not sure why I randomly did that. It holds up surprisingly well though, as the simpler and less hassling arcade crime game. Even it's direct follow-up Vice City added a ton of "realistic" or "deep" shit that distracts from the core gameplay. I like that you can load up GTA3 and drive around shooting fools for thirty minutes and then go play something else.

I quite liked what I played of Doom 64 in the PC conversion. I only got like 4-5 levels in though.

 

GTA 3 is still my favourite for some weird reason. It was one of my first PC games, I guess, and blew my mind twice over with the new possibilities it opened up - both for the genre and for showing me what PC gaming could do. Vice City is great and probably the objectively better game, but there's something that brings me back to 3. I can still remember how cool it looked to pull up in the rain outside your shitty garage hideout in a beaten and hard-won Mafia car, and discovering that the game would just let me fill my car with explosives and ram it into the Mafia boss guy's (diving out at the last moment) to bring the last mission of the first island to a premature close. Good times.

 

Commands Ops with my paintball mod.

 

Yeah, it might just be I remember how mind-blowing the game was when it came out when I replay it. The first time I tried the game was on a PS2 store demo because I wasn't paying much attention to gaming news at the time, I had no idea what was coming. I was pretty shocked.

Vice City has a lot of improvements and I very much prefer it's story. San Andreas got a little too big for me. I very much appreciated GTA4's kind of back-to-basics approach. Reminded me of the simple fun of GTA3. I'm ignoring GTA5 news until they announce a PC version, so I don't really know the style it's going for.

 

Finished Rayman 3 - Hoodlum Havoc

I loved Rayman 2 (played a couple years ago) but part 3 is not as good.
I went with the Gamecube version (via Dolhpin), since PC version had serious issues (constant slowdowns). I encountered some Z-buffer errors (3D areas being improperly/opaquely rendered), but switching from OpenGL to Direct3d plugin fixed that.

Pros:
- mostly challenging gameplay (when it's not unfairly difficult - see below),
- graphics are still nice,
- game is fun to play (not boring, despite being "only" a platformer - Alice 2 bored me to death),

Unfortunately, cons are more prominent:
- game ditches the lighthearted tone of the predecessor and replaces it with forced grimdark/extreme/unfunny mood. Globox is irritating. Andy is even more irritating. The green guy at the beginning is extremely fucking irritating. And the “bonus” videos (different ways to kick Rayman) are not only unfunny and stupid, but cruel as well. WTF?
- gameplay is based either on "basic" abilities (jump/shoot) or "power-up" (strong attack / high jump / rocket launcher). Unfortunately, you receive these power-ups by touching a stationary "charging stations". Which is bad idea gameplay-wise, as it limits gameplay possibilities (found red "can" - door must be nearby; found "yellow" can - a ledge must be somewhere above; etc.).
- collectibles are not fun to collect (one type basically), extras (gained by gathering collectibles) are nothing to write home about,
- way too many boss fights and "mid-boss fights" - most of them are more tedious than hard, some of them are way too easy,
- level design is not that great, most levels are just long corridors filled with jumping puzzles / combat; final level is an exception, but some of its areas are unfair (require starting from the beginning after a single mistake),
- some areas are way too difficult / unfair, like the area before the final boss (maneuvering the hovercraft through some tunnels - you can loose all your HP by touching even a single blade - and there are plenty of them). Quicksaves ahoy!
- final boss is way to tedious: not that difficult to beat, but the fight is way too long (guy has like 5 phases or something + he restores HP in every phase).

tl;dr

Much worse than its predecessor, but still playable.



Started Dishonored and I'm liking it very much. Potential problems:
- Basic gameplay (combat, stealth) looked interesting enough in the initial part. But then I got magic (most of it looks popamole / gamebreaking / unnecessary - DX-HR says hello). And charms (passive upgrades). And some other shit. And even more shit after that. I hope the gameplay won't suffer from this (you can use different approaches, but the outcome will mostly feel the same),
- The game tries to cater to 2 different demographics at the same time: glorious PC master race (things borrowed from Deus Ex / System Shock 2; most of popamole gameplay elements like quest compass, hints, etc. can be disabled) and the console dirty peasants (Half Life 2 / Bioshock influences, the existence of the popamole gameplay elements in the first place).

Also: story is shit and human faces are horribad (Unreal Engine 3 represent?) but these things are not game-breaking...

 

Glad i ditched Rayman 3. From super charming to super douchey, ugh

 

Wasting time on the n:th replay of No One Lives Forever and PES5. Also fucking around in Crusader Kings II for a bit until I feel I've played enough and can move on to EU4.

To me it was the other way around. GTA3 was "meh" overall, with unimaginative missions and absolutely terrible combat. It was somehow more "restrained" than I expected, and also disappointingly formulaic when it came to the story structure. A fun game but a slight disappointment nonetheless. Vice City, on the other hand, was the game I had expected GTA3 to be. Still the best in the series.

Could you even jump out of a moving car in GTA3?

 

This is something that I've seen mentioned many times over, and I don't agree with this.

I've actually played Rayman 3 long ago (would have to replay it eventually), but I remember it struck me back then that the only "grimdark" in the game was the change in art direction into a darker palette.

When you think about it, some Rayman 2 levels were already pretty grim as well, like most of the pirate levels, with the steampunkish aesthetics and tar pits, or the haunted swamp caves, and Rayman 3 is essentially built of such levels on the whole. But it also retains the humour of the predecessor despite the darker surroundings - I remember laughing a lot at the quotes of the big bad dudes from which you gotta hide in some cave, for instance (or whatever that was, shaky memory like, I said) - "we're gonna make him sign a blank cheque"

 

Wasted a few evenings on Game Dev Tycoon. I feel it could've done with a bit more depth - it doesn't really compare to other games with "Tycoon" in the title. Still, it's a nice little game, I had fun for the 10 or so hours that I got out of it.

 

Augmenting my time trying to get out of Grimrock with Papers, Please. Holy fuck who knew looking for discrepancies between passports and work permits could be so....fulfilling.

 

Been enjoying Primordia nonstop for the past two days

 

Primordia and Europa Universalis IV. Both is good stuff.

 

Went back to Left 4 Dead with a couple of buddies to try out the custom Silent Hill campaign and damn, that is still one of the most atmospheric horror games around.

 

I'm just playing a bit of all the games that barely worked on my old PC. ToME4, for example.

 

Just got STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl on steam trade. A few people recommended it but I'm scared before even starting. I'll give it a try.

 

I've been playing Risen 1 again lately. I really liked it when it first came out, but this playthrough I'm discovering a lot more problems. It's still a good game, but it's further from Gothic 1 and 2 than I had previously thought.

Biggest problem is probably that I'm going with an archery build, and holy crap is it OP. About halfway through the second chapter I got enough experience (not through grinding, just from doing all the quests and exploring a bit) to max out my bow, dexterity, and alchemy skills. Suddenly archery turns from a pretty solid means of killing things to the destroyer of worlds. I've heard people say that it's not overpowered because in tight spaces you won't get to shoot, but there are very few spaces tight enough to make that be true, and even when they are very tight, a person with max bow shoots so fast he can probably get a shot off between getting hit by the enemy. With the damage you can deal, that makes it not a very big drawback at all. So basically, there are a few design flaws that combine to make archery stupid good. First, it's simply too easy to level up. Having all those skills maxed should be closer to the end game than just chapter 2. Second, while archery doesn't really become great until you max all those skills out, it's still really useful even with no skill. This is partly because enemies are just too easy in general (you can pretty much get through all of chapter 1 and most of 2 without spending any skill points and just sword n boarding everything). Third, archery just never gets nerfed. You might think, well alright he's in chapter 2, maybe the enemies get tough later on, but I've made it to chapter 4 now and I'm still rofflestomping everything in my path.

There's a few other minor annoyances outside the fact that the game goes a bit downhill after the first 2 chapters. My biggest one is that there are all these cool spells to get past obstacles, except they almost never seem to be usable emergently. Usually it's like, well I need to get past this wall, oh look a very conveniently placed hole for me to shapeshift to get through. The biggest problem I had with this is when I was in a dungeon with a big river of lava in between two walking areas. I used the levitate spell which should have easily gotten me from one area to the next, but instead it inexplicably stopped working as soon as I got over the lava and I fell to my death, simply for trying to use the tools given to me in a way the developers hadn't intended. Instead I was supposed to find a way up from the place I currently was and jump down to the other place, because that's the puzzle they put in the game and no other way of solving it would be acceptable apparently.

Like I said, it's still a good game and I'm having fun, but it could have been a lot better.

 

Finally got around to play Shadow of The Colossus, only to notice that the story/setting feels familiar somehow; was wondering why until i remembered this:

 

Dwarf Fortress. Always Dwarf Fortress.

 

UFO: Aftermath. Made soviet mission, then biomass research to prevent growth. And then - aliens with rocket launchers happen.
Lot of them.
Duh...