What game are you wasting time on?

[BLOBERT]

BROS LOLOLLKN GENEFORGE 4 NOW 3 WASNT SO BAD FOR ME

PLAYING THEM STRAIGHT THROUGH MUCH BE EASIER BECAUSE I CANT PLAY GAMES ALL THE TIME

4 SEEMS EASIER BUT STILL FUN BUT I JUST STARTED

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Command Ops. That game swallows almost all my gaming time.

Streets of Rage Remake.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Sacred 2.

It's shit.

 

[nomask7]

Been playing a bit of Baroque remake. The difficulty level is about right on easy. On normal the game is fun as a sort of how-long-will-I-survive, but on easy you can actually get somewhere with the story without being incredibly skilled.

It's an interesting game. The way you get forward story-wise isn't obvious, and things in general have to be learned through experimentation like in other roguelikes.

 

[Night Goat]

between this game and Drakengard, I'm pretty sure Cavia (the developer) had a burning hatred for the types that feel compelled to do everything in games.

Yes. Yes, they do. I'm pretty sure Cavia hates everyone.

 

[Ivar the Boner]

Decided to refresh my S.T.A.L.K.E.R memory. Cried some Tear of An Stalker for GSC after having a blast playing Shadow of Chernobyl with Oblivion Lost. Clear Sky came next and after Limańsk I stopped crying Tears of An Stalker and started hoping that GSC went out of business because some horrible fire accident. I mean fucking seriously, Limańsk part is so horribly bad and broken that it's worth buying Clear Sky just to see developers of really awesome games (Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat) making complete fools of themselves.

Right now I'm downloading some "Misery MOD" for Call of Pripyat because apparently it makes CoP insanely hard, and low difficulty was my only problem with CoP. It also needs much better rig which I lack so I guess I will have to say hello to static lightning because CoP refuses to even start with any renderer lower than Dx11 and my computer can't handle this game well with Dx11 (rest of Stalker games don't have any problem with that so I don't know what the fuck is going on, if anyone of you knows, help would be nice).

 

[Nutmeg]

Just now I completed Dragon Quest III, and a few days ago I completed Pokemon Emerald.

Before I played Emerald, my distant memories of Pokemon were that its mostly a grinding game, because this is how I finished Yellow as a child. However Pokemon is not really a grinding game, its a party composition, moveset and item optimization game. I did grind, but once, on Victory Road. This was because I was using an HM slave in slot 6, but wanted to have a RestTalk Magneton for the elite four instead. What a great final challenge! Very tense! I was really suffering in the PP department against the champion (I had not been saving elixers or ethers), but my Breloom bailed me out (and even then I had only substitute, mach punch and leech seed to work with, cause I exhausted spore).

One subtle thing I liked is that unlike many JRPGs there was no overworld.

Since pokemon have levels for simulation purposes only, perhaps it would have been wise to have a level cap of 20 instead of 100. This way emphasis would shift to (what I thought was) the most entertaining thing about the game i.e. experimenting with different combinations of pokemon.

What I liked about Dragon Quest III (Super Famicom remake) was:
+ Party optimization (classes and multi-classing, personalities). My party was a sexy fighter, a sexy thief and a sexy dealer turned to sexy jesters turned to sexy sages.
+ The restore, tidy and sort options under the tactics menu.
+ The remember and forget spells.
+ The decrease, increase, barrier, bounce and bikill spells.
+ Open middle and end collect the macgufin quests.
+ Very snappy battles (short and beauitful animations, controllable message speed).
+ The choice between single or multi-hit weapons.

I am going to play the non-remade Super Famicom Fire Emblems next (i.e. Fire Emblem 4 and 5).

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Since pokemon have levels for simulation purposes only, perhaps it would have been wise to have a level cap of 20 instead of 100. This way emphasis would shift to (what I thought was) the most entertaining about the game i.e. experimenting with different combinations of pokemon.

That means less room for growth, which would leave certain species even more locked to certain roles than they are now. That RestTalk Magneton of yours for example wouldn't be possible, because it would much more efficient to make use of its great speed and special attack instead, flinging a thunderbolt before the opponent can move.

 

[DalekFlay]

RPG-wise I just finished KOTOR for the first time. Want to play KOTOR 2 but need a variable between. Decided to finally play the New Vegas DLC, which despite loving the main game I have barely touched.

Shooter-wise I played a lot of Return to Castle Wolfenstein recently. Just got the Shadow Warrior "redux" on Steam and played that for a bit, but didn't really dig the changes and the forces mouseaim, I like playing those old games as intended. So I loaded up the original in DosBox and had more fun with that. I might be crazy but I think Build engine holds up fine.

 

[Darth Roxor]

FURTHER, UNRELATED EDIT : FEAR 1's multiplayer was all kinds of awesome, don't know about the other ones but I played the shit out of that and it was skills-based pwnage heavan.

Its best part was ditching all guns to zoom around with lightning speed, and kung-fu kicking every motherfucker you come across

 

[Grunker]

Currently playing through three games:

Might & Magic VI: Exploration is just as balls-to-the-walls awesome as I remember it, so is character system and management. Combat is even more shit than in VII though, but that hardly matters in M&M.

Skyrim: First time I played this it was one of the worst experiences I've had with a game... well, since Oblivion. But a friend insisted I mod it and try again, so after 129+ mod installations (and a couple more after I began playing) I started playing it again... and holy shit what a difference. Systems actually function now, there is an actual sense of progression, a diversity of encounter difficulty and sense of not knowing what to expect. Resource management, weather systems, the works, no quest compass (but an actual decent journal). The game is very fun so far.

KotOR II: Had to find out whether my love for this game was just nostalgia. It wasn't.

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

Skyrim: First time I played this it was one of the worst experiences I've had with a game... well, since Oblivion. But a friend insisted I mod it and try again, so after 129+ mod installations (and a couple more after I began playing) I started playing it again... and holy shit what a difference. Systems actually function now, there is an actual sense of progression, a diversity of encounter difficulty and sense of not knowing what to expect. Resource management, weather systems, the works, no quest compass (but an actual decent journal). The game is very fun so far.

How's performance of the heavily-modded game? I remember vanilla on release was playable around medium settings on my rig: should I even bother giving it a spin modded or will it make my C2Q 2.83GHz choke on its own blood?

 

[Grunker]

Skyrim: First time I played this it was one of the worst experiences I've had with a game... well, since Oblivion. But a friend insisted I mod it and try again, so after 129+ mod installations (and a couple more after I began playing) I started playing it again... and holy shit what a difference. Systems actually function now, there is an actual sense of progression, a diversity of encounter difficulty and sense of not knowing what to expect. Resource management, weather systems, the works, no quest compass (but an actual decent journal). The game is very fun so far.

How's performance of the heavily-modded game? I remember vanilla on release was playable around medium settings on my rig: should I even bother giving it a spin modded or will it make my C2Q 2.83GHz choke on its own blood?

I didn't want to challenge fate too much, so my graphical mods are restricted to a couple of misc things and then Climates of Tamriel. No super-high-def shit. I'm no graphics ho anyway.

The game feels the load though. My save games are approaching 12megs in size now, and I have somewhat frequent (each two hours of play I'd say) CTDs without warning. A few instances of the eternal loading screen as well. That's too be expected with that mod load though, and so far nothing has made the game unplayable in the least. I did have serious lag issues at one point, but then I went into SKSE's ini and set it to delete invalid registries or somesuch at each launch, and that fixed those.

 

[nomask7]

Might & Magic VI ... Combat is even more shit .

How would you improve MM 6-8 combat? I think the system itself is very good, partly due to how fast it makes combat and how well it gives a sense of the power of your characters and the monsters. Would you really prefer some sort of Wizardry 8 like system where combat takes half an hour per encounter and is basically a different game than the one you were trying to play?

In Might & Magic 6, combat seems to arise naturally out of the game world. In Wizardry 8, it's like some sort of mini game that I, at least, want to avoid as much as possible.

 

[Trash]

Skyrim: First time I played this it was one of the worst experiences I've had with a game... well, since Oblivion. But a friend insisted I mod it and try again, so after 129+ mod installations (and a couple more after I began playing) I started playing it again... and holy shit what a difference. Systems actually function now, there is an actual sense of progression, a diversity of encounter difficulty and sense of not knowing what to expect. Resource management, weather systems, the works, no quest compass (but an actual decent journal). The game is very fun so far.

How's performance of the heavily-modded game? I remember vanilla on release was playable around medium settings on my rig: should I even bother giving it a spin modded or will it make my C2Q 2.83GHz choke on its own blood?

I didn't want to challenge fate too much, so my graphical mods are restricted to a couple of misc things and then Climates of Tamriel. No super-high-def shit. I'm no graphics ho anyway.

The game feels the load though. My save games are approaching 12megs in size now, and I have somewhat frequent (each two hours of play I'd say) CTDs without warning. A few instances of the eternal loading screen as well. That's too be expected with that mod load though, and so far nothing has made the game unplayable in the least. I did have serious lag issues at one point, but then I went into SKSE's ini and set it to delete invalid registries or somesuch at each launch, and that fixed those.

What would you consider to be the must have mods to improve Skyrim? I enjoyed the whole hiking sim part but everything else felt either lacking or even missing.

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

I didn't want to challenge fate too much, so my graphical mods are restricted to a couple of misc things and then Climates of Tamriel. No super-high-def shit. I'm no graphics ho anyway.

The game feels the load though. My save games are approaching 12megs in size now, and I have somewhat frequent (each two hours of play I'd say) CTDs without warning. A few instances of the eternal loading screen as well. That's too be expected with that mod load though, and so far nothing has made the game unplayable in the least. I did have serious lag issues at one point, but then I went into SKSE's ini and set it to delete invalid registries or somesuch at each launch, and that fixed those.

I'm mostly worried about CPU-intensive stuff, which is dynamic scripted things like weather, NPC behaviour, combat mods and the like.
Could you post your system specs so I get some idea of what I should expect from mine?

 

[Grunker]

Might & Magic VI ... Combat is even more shit .

How would you improve MM 6-8 combat?

I would improve the opposition, basically. Give them more special abilities and (clearly the most important here) better AI. Like you, I'm not trying to convert M&M combat into Wizardry (each is its own, good, thing), but in M&M, especially in 6, fighting a group of priests is almost identical to fighting a group of goblins. That can get insanely tedious IMO. Right now combat basically consists of me holding down CTRL in turn-based mode.

Skyrim: First time I played this it was one of the worst experiences I've had with a game... well, since Oblivion. But a friend insisted I mod it and try again, so after 129+ mod installations (and a couple more after I began playing) I started playing it again... and holy shit what a difference. Systems actually function now, there is an actual sense of progression, a diversity of encounter difficulty and sense of not knowing what to expect. Resource management, weather systems, the works, no quest compass (but an actual decent journal). The game is very fun so far.

How's performance of the heavily-modded game? I remember vanilla on release was playable around medium settings on my rig: should I even bother giving it a spin modded or will it make my C2Q 2.83GHz choke on its own blood?

I didn't want to challenge fate too much, so my graphical mods are restricted to a couple of misc things and then Climates of Tamriel. No super-high-def shit. I'm no graphics ho anyway.

The game feels the load though. My save games are approaching 12megs in size now, and I have somewhat frequent (each two hours of play I'd say) CTDs without warning. A few instances of the eternal loading screen as well. That's too be expected with that mod load though, and so far nothing has made the game unplayable in the least. I did have serious lag issues at one point, but then I went into SKSE's ini and set it to delete invalid registries or somesuch at each launch, and that fixed those.

What would you consider to be the must have mods to improve Skyrim? I enjoyed the whole hiking sim part but everything else felt either lacking or even missing.

What is most important for me is that mods feel professional. There is nothing I hate more than contrived, needlessly complicated bullshit that feels "moddy." So all the mods I use generally feel like they fit right into the game, and have very polished systems (Frostfall and Realistic Needs for example).

SkyRe (Skyrim Redone) - Improving overall systems quality and implementing a sense of progression.
Climates of Tamriel - Hiking ain't bleak no more.
Frostfall - Survival mod based on weather. You get cold, have to dress warm (giving actual meaning to wandering around in your wizard robes in the mountains or just carelessly diving into freezing water) and so on. Expands crafting, you need to carry around a tent and some firewood or you'll get fucked once the cold sets in. You can't just dive into freezing water with impunity any longer.
Realistic Needs and Diseases - You need to eat, drink and sleep.
Immersive Weapons: Every Skyrim mod is called "immersive" [something], urgh. Anyway, you'll no longer just find tiered weapons ranging from Iron - Steel - Dwarven - Elven - whatever the fuck. Compatible with Skyre's weapon changes.
Immersive Armors: See above.
Better Quest Objectives: When you turn off the HUD and quest compass, you need better descriptions. While it isn't perfect (a few times I've had to resort to pointer, sadly, because neither NPC or description gave me fuck-all) it improves it a fuck-ton. So far I've used the compass maybe three times and I'm 17 hours in.
Immersive HUD: Removes the heads-up display completely. Your HP, Magicka, Shout cooldown and so on become visible once they become relevant (i.e. you use magicka or take damage). While the removal of the HUD isn't important per se, this also removes the quest compass, which is BOSS!
SkyUI: Welcome back to PC-land traveller. Your UI still ain't great, but it's not the worst UI in the history of UIs either (see: Skyrim's original UI, which made Oblivion look like a PC-only heaven).
Character Creation Overhaul: Instead of "choose race, gender and avatar" you get full-fledged character creation. Choose birth sign, class (you can customize your own) and so on and so forth. A Godsend. Again, fully compatible with Skyrim Redone.
Uncapper/SKSE: The uncapper removes the level and skill cap, and grants you an additional perk point each five levels. This sounds cheesy, but isn't: SkyRe adds alot of perks and you progress more slowly, making more detailed tactical options in the perk tree. The Uncapper is a must unless you want to gimp yourself on purpose. The SKSE is just required for most stuff.

Both Frostfall and Realistic Needs are way less of a hassle than they sound like. They're both very polished systems that you get the hang off quick - they only punish you when you get careless, and they're not a bother to manage. They are also completely customizable in their own menu in SkyUI. Both even detect if you're a Vampire (you become immune to the effects of exposure and don't need to eat or drink) and they have an entire perk tree dedicated to them in Skyrim Redone.

Those I would say are your crucial type of "must have" mods for Skyrim to become an actually worthy experience with system depth and the generation of a reactive world. This is my complete modlist:

Of these, I've only regretted three:

Decent Women - I needed something to fix the "triangular head syndrom" of Skyrim that women have, without women becoming glossy supermodels. Unfortunately even this mod, which purpoted to be "lore-friendly", did exactly that, putting make-up on warrior chicks and such. Disgusting. Uninstalled.
Interesting NPCs - This adds two or three extra NPCs to all locations. Their dialogue is uninteresting (lol), their voice acting is glaringly out of place and they rant forever in dialogue that can take you half an hour to get through for no useful or interesting information.
TTYM - Apparantly the computer saying "you" instead of "I" is actually better. Dunno why I even installed this

Also: if you plan on making a caster, the Apocalypse Spell Mod is supposed to be awesome, but it has issues with SkyRe (creates duplicates of many spells). Compatability is being worked on supposedly, but nothing so far. I just created an Arcane Archer and said fuck spells. Arcane Archery is some new cool stuff in SkyRe.

What I'd really like is a mod that handplaces loot and such around Skyrim, because unfortunately, loot is still tiered and keyed to your level somewhat

Only Requiem does that however, and that mod is its own thing, incompatible with most other shit out there and supposed ball-breakingly hard as well.

But @Trash, catch me or @felipepepe on Steam if you have questions... having felipepepe handy when I went through that installation was really handy. When you mod Skyrim, you need a compiler called BOSS that will go through all of your mods and tell you what Loading Order you should use, stuff like that. Handy with a mate nearby for that.

I didn't want to challenge fate too much, so my graphical mods are restricted to a couple of misc things and then Climates of Tamriel. No super-high-def shit. I'm no graphics ho anyway.

The game feels the load though. My save games are approaching 12megs in size now, and I have somewhat frequent (each two hours of play I'd say) CTDs without warning. A few instances of the eternal loading screen as well. That's too be expected with that mod load though, and so far nothing has made the game unplayable in the least. I did have serious lag issues at one point, but then I went into SKSE's ini and set it to delete invalid registries or somesuch at each launch, and that fixed those.

I'm mostly worried about CPU-intensive stuff, which is dynamic scripted things like weather, NPC behaviour, combat mods and the like.
Could you post your system specs so I get some idea of what I should expect from mine?

Almost none of the mods I posted above use heavy (or any at all, actually) scripting, as I wanted to avoid that as well. I use almost no graphical enhancements or stuff that relies on scripting, even in the jungle of mods I posted above.

My specs are:

2.66GHz Quad Core
8GB of DDR2 RAM
ATI Radeon 4870 512MB GPU
Samsung SSD 840 Series 250GB Harddisk (this is AWESOME - best purchase ever!)
Windows 7 OS, obviously

 

[Multiple Sarcasm]

Almost none of the mods I posted above use heavy (or any at all, actually) scripting, as I wanted to avoid that as well. I use almost no graphical enhancements or stuff that relies on scripting, even in the jungle of mods I posted above.

My specs are:

2.66GHz Quad Core
8GB of DDR2 RAM
ATI Radeon 4870 512MB GPU
Samsung SSD 840 Series 250GB Harddisk (this is AWESOME - best purchase ever!)
Windows 7 OS, obviously

Hey, that's pretty identical to mine, except no SSD (I know, I know), so I guess I should be okay. Thanks a bunch.

 

[Grunker]

Almost none of the mods I posted above use heavy (or any at all, actually) scripting, as I wanted to avoid that as well. I use almost no graphical enhancements or stuff that relies on scripting, even in the jungle of mods I posted above.

My specs are:

2.66GHz Quad Core
8GB of DDR2 RAM
ATI Radeon 4870 512MB GPU
Samsung SSD 840 Series 250GB Harddisk (this is AWESOME - best purchase ever!)
Windows 7 OS, obviously

Hey, that's pretty identical to mine, except no SSD (I know, I know), so I guess I should be okay. Thanks a bunch.

My computer began having issues a while back. Lag, long loading times, that sort of thing. I added 4 gigs of RAM, it did very little. Thought it might be my GPU, but had no money to replace it.

Got an SSD on recommendation from a friend. Fixed every single issue I had. I realize my old harddrive was probably broken (using it as a slave drive now) but even so, life after the SSD has improved on many fronts. Highly recommendable!

 

[Endemic]

Playing some custom missions for X-Wing Alliance. There's a lot of untapped potential in the game engine that wasn't used in the stock campaign.

 

[nomask7]

I would improve the opposition, basically. Give them more special abilities and (clearly the most important here) better AI.

OK. Special abilities, good. Better AI, it depends. If better AI means the monsters will always use the most efficient way to kill your characters, and will always kill your weakest characters first (weakest in terms of defense) and then move on to the next weakest, then that's not such a good idea necessarily as it would increase predictability in its own way and the latter behaviour especially would make the game annoying.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

What I'd really like is a mod that handplaces loot and such around Skyrim, because unfortunately, loot is still tiered and keyed to your level somewhat

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/files/file/1412-morrowloot/

Only Requiem does that however, and that mod is its own thing, incompatible with most other shit out there and supposed ball-breakingly hard as well.

The difficulty is fair...you just have to give obviously dangerous enemies like vampires, sorcerers and werewolves a wide berth until you're strong enough. Also you can use SkyTweak to change the damage variables (I think it comes with Dragonborn's "Legendary" difficulty setting by default, which causes enemies to do 300% damage and you to cause 25%. While that's acceptable in vanilla, the Adept setting is more than enough for Requiem)

 

[Trash]

Thanks heaps for that, @Grunker!

 

[felipepepe]

Been playing some co-op with my brother, after beating RE6, we now delve into the world of GC/Wii emulation, and are killing ourselves at Donkey Country Returns. Quite fun.

 

[Quilty]

I've been playing MoW: Assault Squad with a couple of buddies. The game's co-op elements are rather addictive, but the way AI just one-shots shit all over the place makes me wonder if there isn't some heavy behind the scenes cheating on the part of the AI.

Other than that, CK2 with Trash's Memento Mori mod. Brofist for that all the way, makes the game thrilling. I'm knee-deep in stillborn infants and lovin' it.