What game are you wasting time on?

[Clockwork Knight]

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2026208

http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Dead_Space#Remapping

 

[J_C]

... I don't believe this. I just... can't fathom the level of stupidity needed for this kind of shit.

2 games I've played in recent months have been outright hostile to me. Reason? They won't let me re-define the controls to my tastes. When it comes to using a keyboard+mouse, I'm left-handed. I use the numeric pad, not WASD. But when it comes to re-defining the keys for these two games, I'm not allowed to use the Enter key, for example. No biggie, you would think, except... both games RESET my keybindings as I started the game. Forward was assigned to Keypad 8, suddenly it was back to "W" when I started the game... and now the game wouldn't let me change it back. As far as these two titles are concerned, it's WASD or die in a fire.

Fortunately for me, I didn't put down money on either title, but they've been gifted to me through the Begstravaganza thread. Unfortunately for the ones who gave them to me, they're as good as wasted as I can't get ANYWHERE in the games like this.

Oh, and the games? Dead Space and Mirror's Edge. What do they have in common? They're both EA games. The last EA game I played before these two was American McGee's Alice. Now EA has assured that I will NEVER attempt to play any of their games again, let alone buy them.

Fuck you, EA. Fuck you.

Obviously games and companies have to cater to gays, trannies, mentally handicapped, deaf and retard people, but not left handed. Because what are you thinking you want to change keybindings?

 

[spekkio]

Finished Portal 2

Good:

- classic gameplay plus some new thingies (gels, hard light bridges),
- great atmosphere (reminds me of Nihei’s BLAME!), mostly good and funny writing (defective turrets!),
- surprisingly long when compared to part 1,
- players finally get a chance to use portals outside of testing chambers,

Not so good:

- constant loading - a feature in Source Engine, but still irritating,
- Wheatley is WAY to talkative, GLaDOS is much more fun to listen,
- some puzzles drag on a bit too long (esp. gel-related ones),
- the game sometimes tries too hard to be witty / funny / AWESOME!,
- final two chapters are a bit of a letdown,
- extremely linear at its core (find one and only solution to a puzzle); I know that more freedom would probably often lead to getting stuck, with quickload being the only solution, bit still: sometimes just having 2-3 ways of solving a puzzle would be enough.

tl;dr

 

[sea]

I finished Tomb Raider with 100% completion. Thoughts are basically the same as the first ones I posted, however, I've gotta say that I really liked the final area designs (namely the Shipwrecked Coast). Spoilers below:

Spoiler

• The story is super dumb. You can see exactly where it's going probably 1/3 through the game but the rest of the characters seem oblivious to what's going on. The game tries for a big reveal that's apparently meant to be shocking, but I had already worked it out ages ago. Made Lara look like a rather poor archaeologist.
• But, that said, there are some surprisingly good character moments. The best one in the game is when you return to the shipwreck from the intro and you get that scene where Lara looks in the mirror and sees how different she looks after her adventure, mirroring (derp) the same thing in the intro. I also like how her voice changes over the game's course, going from relatively timid to confident and in control towards the end. It's a subtle transition but it's done well.
• The supporting cast does get a bit more fleshed out as the story goes on but I still think more could have been done here. Really obvious betrayals etc. abound - I really don't like when games so clearly telegraph who the villains are early on.
• The unrealistic nature of the island really bothered me throughout - most notably the fact that you literally kill hundreds of people during the game, and that there seems to be an endless supply of guns, ammo, armor, etc. How could this place possibly have gone unnoticed by the rest of the world for so long? The Solarii cult is so huge they can afford to throw their initiates in a pit to fend for themselves in some sort of bizarre survival ritual, and there are many places where you spot hundreds if not thousands of dead bodies. It's just ridiculous and completely unbelievable in a way that really breaks with the serious themes and tone of the rest of the story.
• Also immersion-breaking was how fast and loose the game played with its characters moving around the island. Lara has to go through absurd platforming gymnastics to get anywhere she wants to go... but apparently she's the only person who needs to do so. Everyone else has their own personal teleportation device that lets them show up exactly where the plot needs them to. Is everyone just laughing behind Lara's back about the fact she's doing everything the hard way? When the only way to get somewhere is doing death-defying leaps hundreds of feet in the air... why the fuck is there anything there to begin with?
• Fucking ancient undead samurai. I have no words for how derpy that was. Again, I know Tomb Raider has had supernatural elements before but it doesn't fit with the serious tone of the game at all.
  
• I feel like the game started life as an open-world title but gradually became more linear during development. A lot of the ideas like hunting, fast travel, revisiting old areas etc. feel tacked on and I have to imagine that's because at some point they couldn't reconcile their storyline with truly free exploration. You can really clearly see how the survival element would have fit into a true open-world game.
  
• The game desperately needed a few more good puzzles. Most of the platforming and puzzle challenges are ludicrously simple and probably less challenging than stuff you got in the first level of, say, Tomb Raider: Legend. The goal seems to have been to break up the action, not to actually provide good puzzles or platforming in their own right.
• Combat is pretty fun and challenging, but on hard mode, also a little cheap. If you're in the open and an enemy gets the chance to open up into you, there's basically nothing you can do - you're dead. This feels counter to the way the game seems to encourage you to use melee, close-quarters weapons like the shotgun, and constantly forces you out of cover with grenades when you're at range. Those undead samurai you fight towards the end also have insta-kill, un-dodgeable, non-counterable melee attacks - what genius thought that was a good idea to have in the game?
• I probably ended up dying more often due to the occasionally wonky and imprecise controls rather than due to any of the game's real challenges. Even in combat I often died because the game inexplicably caused my movement controls to freeze up, or because I got stuck on a ledge somewhere. The controls do work most of the time, just that when it comes to small and subtle movements, they often send you running over a ledge. I would have liked to have seen a walk button toggle when you need more precision, though I imagine this is less a problem with a gamepad.
  
• There's bugs too, namely with the save system. At one point I lost close to an hour of progress because the game crashed when I Alt+Tabbed - even though it supposedly autosaves after everything you do, I found that was not the case at all. It got especially annoying at times when I quit the game properly, making sure to rest at a nearby campfire - only to find the lengthy puzzle I'd done had reset itself for no apparent reason. I despise these shitty checkpoint save systems - if you are going to use checkpoints, do it right, and make sure the game actually does save everything as it happens; otherwise let me save manually whenever I want so I know when the game really has saved.
• The game has great production values and really looks fantastic when maxed out. Running on my R9 280X with a bit of an overclock, I got 60 fps at 1080p in most spots, with only some occasional hitches and drops in some of the really huge open areas - that seems more like an optimization issue though, i.e. the game not using aggressive enough LOD scaling for the terrain. Though, artistically it often suffers from a lack of contrast in the colour palette that can sometimes make it hard to see things, and I had extra trouble with the added FXAA blurriness due to that lack of contrast, until I overrode it with SMAA instead.

 

[Surf Solar]

So you hate that TR has those senseless stashes and shit to collect, yet you go out your way to complete and gather everything? oO


I have got myself Cossacks on Steam. Loved the game as a kid and will have some skirmishes tonight. <3
I also got Underrail because I wanted Styg to have my moneyz, but I am kinda reluctant to start it, as I want to experience the game when it's finished or feauture complete..

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Somewhere in Act 2 of MoTB. If it weren't for the spirit meter, Rashemen would be a fine place to just dick around in. Music's pretty good as well.

 

[AlexOfSpades]

Finished VtM:B again, this time as a female Tremere.

Got the Camarilla ending. Hot damn i love this game. I'd say 10/10 but simple numbers cant express the amazing level of dialogue and story of this game. The replayability. The atmosphere and soundtrack. Everything. People talk about artistic games? VtM:B is pure art in my opinion. Its story is good enough to warrant a movie, except its 30 hours long and has multiple possibilities - and when i say that i mean it. Its not the DXHR/Skyrim "Kill dude like this or like that", no. Play a Ventrue, then play a Nosferatu, then a Malkavian. It will be completely different. I rolled a Malk and i'm amazed with how many dialogues changed - holy shit, these devs thought of everything. This is the pinnacle of game design, for me, and if one day i ever develop a game i will aim for Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines.

Incredible experience that my poor brazilian vocabulary cannot describe.

 

[sea]

So you hate that TR has those senseless stashes and shit to collect, yet you go out your way to complete and gather everything? oO

I don't hate it. I am a total completionist whore in games where completionism is reasonable, so I'll do it. However, I also feel that the collectibles would make more sense in a fully open-world game, or if they had some sort of role in the game mechanics. The game is called Tomb Raider but the raiding of tombs (and other ancient archaeological sites) is basically incidental. In the other games in the series, acquiring those ancient artifacts was the goal; now it's just a Thing You Do Because Why Not.

 

[StaticSpine]

Finished VtM:B again, this time as a female Tremere.

Hot damn i love this game. I'd say 10/10 but simple numbers cant express the amazing level of dialogue and story of this game. The replayability. The atmosphere and soundtrack. Everything. People talk about artistic games? VtM:B is pure art in my opinion. Its story is good enough to warrant a movie, except its 30 hours long and has multiple possibilities - and when i say that i mean it. Its not the DXHR/Skyrim "Kill dude like this or like that", no. Play a Ventrue, then play a Nosferatu, then a Malkavian. It will be completely different. I rolled a Malk and i'm amazed with how many dialogues changed - holy shit, these devs thought of everything. This is the pinnacle of game design, for me, and if one day i ever develop a game i will aim for Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines.

And it's really really painful to grasp than management/publisher issues ruined the game release and later bankrupted Troika. This is so lame.

 

[RK47]

Tried game of thrones rpg.
experienced combat for 2 mins.
uninstalled.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Tried game of thrones rpg.
experienced combat for 2 mins.
uninstalled.

Use a magnar and just roflstomp through it.

 

[Cyberarmy]

I finished Tomb Raider with 100% completion. Thoughts are basically the same as the first ones I posted, however, I've gotta say that I really liked the final area designs (namely the Shipwrecked Coast). Spoilers below:

Spoiler

• The story is super dumb. You can see exactly where it's going probably 1/3 through the game but the rest of the characters seem oblivious to what's going on. The game tries for a big reveal that's apparently meant to be shocking, but I had already worked it out ages ago. Made Lara look like a rather poor archaeologist.
• But, that said, there are some surprisingly good character moments. The best one in the game is when you return to the shipwreck from the intro and you get that scene where Lara looks in the mirror and sees how different she looks after her adventure, mirroring (derp) the same thing in the intro. I also like how her voice changes over the game's course, going from relatively timid to confident and in control towards the end. It's a subtle transition but it's done well.
• The supporting cast does get a bit more fleshed out as the story goes on but I still think more could have been done here. Really obvious betrayals etc. abound - I really don't like when games so clearly telegraph who the villains are early on.
• The unrealistic nature of the island really bothered me throughout - most notably the fact that you literally kill hundreds of people during the game, and that there seems to be an endless supply of guns, ammo, armor, etc. How could this place possibly have gone unnoticed by the rest of the world for so long? The Solarii cult is so huge they can afford to throw their initiates in a pit to fend for themselves in some sort of bizarre survival ritual, and there are many places where you spot hundreds if not thousands of dead bodies. It's just ridiculous and completely unbelievable in a way that really breaks with the serious themes and tone of the rest of the story.
• Also immersion-breaking was how fast and loose the game played with its characters moving around the island. Lara has to go through absurd platforming gymnastics to get anywhere she wants to go... but apparently she's the only person who needs to do so. Everyone else has their own personal teleportation device that lets them show up exactly where the plot needs them to. Is everyone just laughing behind Lara's back about the fact she's doing everything the hard way? When the only way to get somewhere is doing death-defying leaps hundreds of feet in the air... why the fuck is there anything there to begin with?
• Fucking ancient undead samurai. I have no words for how derpy that was. Again, I know Tomb Raider has had supernatural elements before but it doesn't fit with the serious tone of the game at all.
  
• I feel like the game started life as an open-world title but gradually became more linear during development. A lot of the ideas like hunting, fast travel, revisiting old areas etc. feel tacked on and I have to imagine that's because at some point they couldn't reconcile their storyline with truly free exploration. You can really clearly see how the survival element would have fit into a true open-world game.
  
• The game desperately needed a few more good puzzles. Most of the platforming and puzzle challenges are ludicrously simple and probably less challenging than stuff you got in the first level of, say, Tomb Raider: Legend. The goal seems to have been to break up the action, not to actually provide good puzzles or platforming in their own right.
• Combat is pretty fun and challenging, but on hard mode, also a little cheap. If you're in the open and an enemy gets the chance to open up into you, there's basically nothing you can do - you're dead. This feels counter to the way the game seems to encourage you to use melee, close-quarters weapons like the shotgun, and constantly forces you out of cover with grenades when you're at range. Those undead samurai you fight towards the end also have insta-kill, un-dodgeable, non-counterable melee attacks - what genius thought that was a good idea to have in the game?
• I probably ended up dying more often due to the occasionally wonky and imprecise controls rather than due to any of the game's real challenges. Even in combat I often died because the game inexplicably caused my movement controls to freeze up, or because I got stuck on a ledge somewhere. The controls do work most of the time, just that when it comes to small and subtle movements, they often send you running over a ledge. I would have liked to have seen a walk button toggle when you need more precision, though I imagine this is less a problem with a gamepad.
  
• There's bugs too, namely with the save system. At one point I lost close to an hour of progress because the game crashed when I Alt+Tabbed - even though it supposedly autosaves after everything you do, I found that was not the case at all. It got especially annoying at times when I quit the game properly, making sure to rest at a nearby campfire - only to find the lengthy puzzle I'd done had reset itself for no apparent reason. I despise these shitty checkpoint save systems - if you are going to use checkpoints, do it right, and make sure the game actually does save everything as it happens; otherwise let me save manually whenever I want so I know when the game really has saved.
• The game has great production values and really looks fantastic when maxed out. Running on my R9 280X with a bit of an overclock, I got 60 fps at 1080p in most spots, with only some occasional hitches and drops in some of the really huge open areas - that seems more like an optimization issue though, i.e. the game not using aggressive enough LOD scaling for the terrain. Though, artistically it often suffers from a lack of contrast in the colour palette that can sometimes make it hard to see things, and I had extra trouble with the added FXAA blurriness due to that lack of contrast, until I overrode it with SMAA instead.

That game really changed a lot in development, according to first arts and info it could be some kind of survival horror action. But we got derpy QTE action with FC kind of crafting instead.

I'm playing Star Wolves nowadays, haven't able to play it due to graphical problems on my previous rig. Gameplay is quite nice but I hate the voice over and most of the soundtrack...
Anyone here played 2 and/or 3? Want to play them too if they are worthwhile.

 

[sexbad?]

I got Crysis 3 for $5 on Amazon's editor's choice sale today. It's not as bad as Crysis 2, but it's still covered in bullshit. There's awful story seeping from every pore, environments too simple for the suit powers, and an invisibility mechanic that's way too generous. The enemies are quicker to react when they spot you (contrasted with C2's "Oh look, an enemy... What am I to do now?"), which is nice. It also goes the Metro: Last Light way with level design where the levels are very linear and segmented, but in acceptable ways so that the individual rooms are still pretty open, varied individual rooms.

But after I got about halfway through I ended up just starting up Crysis again and playing through the first three levels.

 

[LundB]

Tried game of thrones rpg.
experienced combat for 2 mins.
uninstalled.

For me it was the godawful camera controls that made it truly terrible.

 

[Humppaleka]

Kek, I'm playing it with my girlfriend occasionally who is a huge A Song of Ice and Fire fan. I like it because I can just ignore most mechanics as it is quite easy even on Lord (or whatever the hardest was) difficulty and focus on everything else.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Finished VtM:B again, this time as a female Tremere.

Got the Camarilla ending. Hot damn i love this game. I'd say 10/10 but simple numbers cant express

a friend of mine and me have been working on a different scale which goes from 0 to tits, which tends to infinite but is a real number, because there's nothing better than tits and tits are real.
when you feel the need to express such concepts, try using "it's almost tits", "next to tits" or "approximately tits".

 

[octavius]

Playing Duke Nukem 3D for the first time, and I at times catch myself giggling like Beavis&Butthead.
Original version looks rather ugly and has crap controls, so I installed the EDuke32 source port. In 1680x1050 it looks good enough, and the controls are very smooth, so no motion sickness.
Breezed through the first three levels, and the game feels so right, especially after having played loots of Doom WADs lately. Being able to use grenades (or Pipe Bombs) and jumping is something I miss when playing Doom.
Looks like DK3D was the game that invented crawling through air ducts too.

 

[skacky]

Duke3d also has some really nice custom maps if you want more kickass action after you're done with the game.

 

[octavius]

Duke3d also has some really nice custom maps if you want more kickass action after you're done with the game.

Any recommendations for custom maps or sites with lists of the best ones?

 

[Gurkog]

Ok, got tired of running out of filters playing ranger mode in Metro 2033. So, I said fuck it, and set it on easy. The gameplay is shit, but everything else about it is at least OK. I rate it

I should have played STALKER again instead. Oh well.

 

[skacky]

Duke3d also has some really nice custom maps if you want more kickass action after you're done with the game.

Any recommendations for custom maps or sites with lists of the best ones?

Metropolitan Mayhem and Duke Nukem Forever 2013 (+ additional maps) are definitely maps you want to play. Others I tremendously enjoyed are the WGSpace series, Border Town, Voices of Authority, Grey Lights, The AMC Pleaser, etc. You can find lots of maps here: http://www.scent-88.com/

 

[Tommers]

Just got dominions 4. Still reading the manual. Looks like it could be great.

 

[Angthoron]

Got a present of TDE: Demonicon from a bro, gave it a spin. Way to ruin an incest story, devs, good job.

 

[GreyViper]

Got a present of TDE: Demonicon from a bro, gave it a spin. Way to ruin an incest story, devs, good job.

Was hoping to and the combat is bit simplified nothing similar compared Drakensang. Reminds me bit to much of Dragon Age 2. :/

 

[Angthoron]

Got a present of TDE: Demonicon from a bro, gave it a spin. Way to ruin an incest story, devs, good job.

Was hoping to and the combat is bit simplified nothing similar compared Drakensang. Reminds me bit to much of Dragon Age 2. :/

It's basically a DA2 clone, yeah, at least judging from what I've seen/read about DA2. Down to the hawkesome dialogue wheel.