What game are you wasting time on?

[J_C]

Still playing Deus Ex 1. A good game overall, although Human Revolution does a better job at using the augmentations. In DX1, they appear almost useless, since I'm playing at a stealth character. Basicly I'm playing it like thief.

You get silent running, high jumping, extra speed, lifting heavy objects, aqualung, radiation resistance, etc. All of those are useful for a stealthy character because stealthy characters rely on navigating (and creating) alternate paths through the environments. The augmentations are basically generic tools you can use creatively (but are rarely required, at least early in the game). This is unlike Human Revolution where stealth largely consists of picking the "cloaking" augmentation and running past all the enemies and following the obvious vent-pathways.

Yes, I should go back and correct myself. I advanced some more in the game and got some advanced augmentations, they can be more useful than the basic ones. Although I could still play the game without them, just ghosting among the guards and knocking them out with a baton.

 

[AngryEddy]

Just beat Valkyria Chronicles + DLC not too long ago, now i'm working on The Force Unleashed 2.

 

[Boyarpunk]

Supplementing my run through Nexus: The Jupiter Incident with some FTL. Why didn't I play either of these gems sooner?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

and nexus had an awesome multiplayer too.

 

[AlexOfSpades]

Anyone else playing Warframe? I'm loving being a space ninja with magic.

 

[spekkio]

Finished Violently aborted Tomb Raider - Anniversary

Holy Wall of Text inside

Pros:
- graphics are nice / great artistically-wise,
- you can now enable /disable "action" icon, so you no longer have to press "action" button on everything looking usable,
- Level design refers to the original TR (which was the point of the remake, I guess). Oldfags would be pleased (at least before realizing that the game is inferior to its predecessor in every way except graphics).
- regular gameplay (climbing / jumping / exploring) has nice atmosphere. Too bad I can't say the same about combat and DAT boss-battles.

Cons:
- Autosave system. Much more irritating than in Legend, since there are much more difficult jumping sections. Many times it's much faster to let Lara die (by jumping off some high ledge) than repeat some long section. Shitty game design at its best. "But BRO, it's all consoles' fault! Not enough RAM and shit". Yeah? That's why PoP (the game that Tomb Raider 7-9 clearly tries to mimic) uses the time-rewind gimmick. See below. Penalty points for using one autosave system for both the Manor and the main game. I started by completing the manor, then started the game and... my autosave got overwritten (and you can't use manual saves in Manor). Did anybody actually playtested this game?
- Relies too much on the gameplay formula established by the newshit Prince of Persia games (follow a set path of ledges from start to finish), but without the time-rewind mechanics or the quicksave system. Enjoy repeating some segments over and over and over while wasting Medpacks and enjoying bad controls. I decided to use a trainer, which has a "teleport" option: you can set a marker with one key and teleport to it later with another. Makes the game much less frustrating.
- Boss battles are based on unskippable cutscenes, QTEs and shitty gimmick (adrenaline dodge). Single worst part of the entire game. Figuring them out without consulting the FAQ is often impossible / totally random. For example, the 2nd boss fight is against 2 fags who sometimes use special attack (turning Lara into stone). It's reversible (keep pressing directional buttons like crazy - yeah, Decathlon was one of the best games evar after all) but it's better to avoid it. But how? Intuitive solution (player who played some games in his life = me): try dodging / jumping away / doing kick-ass maneuvers. Doesn't work, since the attack seems homing. Authors' (people who played less than 10 games in their lives) solution: holster your weapons and the enemies will cancel their attack.



- Controls are better than in #7 (Legend), but still kinda bad. I would take the old "tank" controls over this newshit "analogue" controls any day. In the past I was able to do anything I wanted, combat or not, and now I often end up dead, due to irresponsive controls. Fortunately, jumping from solid surfaces (ledges) are no longer camera-oriented (as it was in Legend), so if you want to jump to the right, it's enough to press right+jump (rocket science). Unfortunately, using horizontal poles and jumping while using the grapple are still camera oriented, so to perform "grapple jump" in the direction opposite to the wall, you have to: 1) set the camera correctly 2) jump 3) use grapple 4) set the camera again (facing desired direction) 5) keep going left and right to keep momentum 6) press back+jump in a proper moment 7) repeat, since you didn't set the camera properly. AFAIR from PoP, so-called wall-runs were character-oriented, so to jump away from the wall you just have to use "jump" in a correct moment. But hey: " It worked? Let's change it to something worse".
- Due to shitty camera, some jumping puzzles are based on trial and error. What I mean: I can see a "bright" ledge (PROTIP from the devs: this ledge can be reached!) but I'm not sure if I can reach it from my current position (since it's impossible to set the camera in a spot good enough to estimate the distance). Let's just jump and pray for the best.
- FOV seems lower than in Legend, so the camera feels too close to Lara (nice ass, but that's not what the game is about, I would prefer seeing more of the environment),
- for every gun except the Uzi, "fire" button is no longer momentary + recurrent (as it was... AFAIR always, when it comes to TR games). So, you can't just keep "fire" button pressed to keep firing, you have to click for every single fucking shot. What the flying fuck?
- swimming system is worse than in 1-4 (the ones I played). In the past, using WASD was TURNING Lara up/left/down/right and there was a "swim forward" button (flight/space sims use similar system, for both analogue and digital controls). Unfortunately, in this game you have to use A&D to turn L&R, W&S to swim forward/backward (WAT?), jump to swim up and duck to swim down (I remember similar system being used in Extreme Assault - one of the reasons nobody gives a fuck about it, while Archimedean Dynasty (same engine) is still one of the best games evar). Clunky as fuck, since very often you have to keep repositioning Lara to go past some obstacle or to reach the surface.
- Combat model is worse than in the originals. Enemies mostly consist of animals using melee attacks, but they are very difficult to deal with, since their attack can stun Lara easily. Enemies using ranged attacks are much easier (they keep their distance and their projectiles don't stun, at least till you reach the Atlantis...). Implementing the "adrenaline dodge" mechanics made the combat even worse. When enraged, enemy will rush at Lara, hitting her ass and leg with a powerful attack. To avoid it, you have to dodge at a correct moment (game goes slow-mo) and one-shoot the enemy at the proper moment (two crosshairs overlapping). Basically, it's another QTE gizmo, appearing DURING A GODDAMNED BATTLE, often against 2-4 enemies! Imagine this: combat encounter begins, you start jumping, running around and shooting (pressing buttons like crazy)... BUT suddenly you have to stop pressing anything (insta-fail of "adrenaline doge" QTE) and wait for screen prompts. Of course, other enemies can still hit you. Whoever designed this, should be killed made GD mod.
- Levels are far from being perfect when it comes to playtesting. You can skip entire sections by making jumps that the authors thought impossible, but you can also die due to a glitch (Lara getting stuck in the environment or falling through a wall / floor). Playtesting is for fags, I know. The online FAQ has entire sections devoted to glitches and ways of avoiding them. Glorious PC master-race western developers.
- There are rare slowdowns in some areas (too many moving objects / fire / water?). Not present in previous game, which used the same engine.
- Levels are much smaller than in the original game. They are more about re-making the most memorable element from the original level (big waterfall, huge vertical room, sphinx) than remaking the level in its entirety.

To some point, the game is (worse than the original in every way except graphics, but still worth playing). Unfortunately, if you reach the final level, things will get from bad to unacceptable.

In the middle of the 13th level, there's a jumping segment that clearly wasn't tested properly and / or fixed in a patch.

Problems:
a) It's timed, and you have to repeat a battle against two enemies with every retry.
b) It requires close to perfect performance when maneuvering on 3 horizontal poles, which is camera-oriented. Very difficult to do using M+K.
c) Even when you do the above, next phase of the puzzle requires you to very quickly perform two grapple-jumps (camera-oriented maneuvers again).

Some people have found a non-cosher way of dealing with this part, but it's still very difficult to pull-off:



Read the comments if you want to know more about this section and why it's rather broken than deliberately made difficult.

I was thinking about uninstalling the game at this point (I wasted enough of my time on this POS) but decided to download a special savegame (made after this puzzle) from tombraiders.net and try to finish the game. To my surprise, I was able to complete 2 following jumping puzzles during my first try (both are quite easy).
Unfortunately, when I reached next boss battle, I finally decided to give up.

In order to kill the boss, you have to damage his hands (fingers) multiple times, which should ultimately lead to ITZ falling down. Unfortunately, the controls are so unresponsive, that it becomes a fucking chore (Lara will often keep shooting at enemy's head, instead of its hands - switching targets is wonky in ALL 3 targeting modes). And since the battle is taking place at the edge of the abyss, the boss will throw Lara off the ledge sooner or later (you have to use the adrenaline dodge to make his hands vulnerable).
Sorry, but I have better games to play.

tl;dr

If you stop playing before Level #13: mediocre game, lacking in many areas.



If you reach Level #13: broken, unpatched, unplayable mess.

(pretty graphics, all other aspects will make you appreciate the original even more)



I don't remember the last time when I really wanted to complete a game, yet decided to uninstall it before the end. Great job, Crystal Dynamics, great fucking job.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Tomb Raider Anniversary is maybe the hardest 3D platformer I've ever played. Some of the later platforming bits are insane, and as you said, it uses an autosave which makes it that much harder. I remember a few of the boss fights being really annoying too. Still, I did complete the whole game. I had to use a youtube video on some of the later jumping sections, though. I was feeling alot of 90s nostalgia at the time, listening to alot of Smashing Pumkins to try to recreate what it was like playing the original when I was 12, so that probably propelled me through as it was the first Tomb Raider I had played since Tomb Raider 2.

 

[spekkio]

I replayed original Tomb Raider a couple years ago (PSX version, using a gamepad instead of the keyboard for the 1st time) and had a blast from the past (the game is as good as ever).
Then I replayed TR2 (PC version, but again - using a gamepad this time). Not as good as 1, but still decent.
I plan to replay TR3 in the future, but first I have to try Underworld.
I hated TR4 for some reason (some gameplay changes for worse, depressing environments - brown desert / cities everywhere).

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I overdozed on Tomb Raider for life after finishing the Gold versions of the first two games. I tried playing the third game a few years ago, but didn't even finish the first level.

That the series has lasted as long as it has, that it has recycled as much of its material as it has, shows me how flimsy a premise the whole game is based on - everyone knows the two reasons why the series became a hit in the first place.

Thanks for showing me that TR Anniversary is terribad.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I wouldn't say it's terribad. I remember quite enjoying most of it. I remember it having some really great puzzles in some of its middle bits (I remember one where you move blocks up and down in a giant room full of water that was really fun, for example). It's just that some parts in the final level are hair-pullingly frustrating. I tend not to mind that stuff as much as some people, though (plus, I remember, vaguely, the youtube video being slightly wrong. You have to hold your camera in just the right spot to make that final jumping sequence work right and once I stumbled on that it became much easier....but it's been like 3 years since I played it so I can't remember what the trick is).

The final boss fight does downright suck, though.

 

[Mebber]

Playing Thief 3 for the first time right now, been discouraged to play it sooner because i've heard so many bad things about it.

Well, it's not as terrible as i've expected it to be. Pretty bad in many parts, yes, but i expected it to be even worse.

 

[Keshik]

Cities in Motion 2 is fun for me though I'm inept at setting up systems - though I am learning by doing rather than reading up. People move around in weird ways, which causes the system design I try to be tricky as sometimes they transfer off and then on to the same line at different points.

 

[Baron Dupek]

So after finishing Thief Gold I decided to finish Thief 2 (only 3 mission) and got lucky because some VIP, that Garret kidnapped, spawned nearby exit of the mission
And well - last mission was boring. Grab some shit, build this, blow that and broke few machines. Sounds cool for any game except sneaky game like.... I don't know, maybe Thief?
What mission was cool? Mask, Life of the Party (roof jumping and robbing the not-so-bright nobles) and 2nd mission in the port.

 

[Jarakka]

Well I don't know if this counts, as I finished the game a couple days ago, but I just got to say this.

Sengoku Rance is a 4.5/5 game and I heartily recommend it to everyone. Seriously, go play it now. I was personally a bit skeptical at first too, but the game is just so goddamn solid. The gameplay, the music, the challenge and Rance. And I mean Rance, that guy. That guy...

And I wouldn't have known this game had even existed if I hadn't seen it's LP here on Codex, so thanks to whoever made it. Stuff like that makes me keep an eye on this forum.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Carmageddon 2, Armored Brigade, Steam and Iron: Russo-Japanese War.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Hard Reset. Pretty graphics and lots of explosions, but not very fun ultimately and often rather frustrating. The flaws of it are all the more puzzling because it's supposed to have been made by former Painkiller developers, and Painkiller had none of them. You move relatively slowly, have a sprint button for no good reason, and enemies are all much faster than you, even ranged ones. They are few in variety, have tons of health, and the game loves to spawn tons of them at once, so the gameplay literally consists of running away 90% of the time in combat. Often in rather small areas, just to make it more annoying. And even though it looks good from both a technical and artistic point of view, the lighting often makes it difficult to see enemies and items clearly, and you rather easily get stuck on anything lying on the ground, which is problematic, given that everything explodes into small pieces of debris.

I finished the base game, and tried a bit of the expansion to see if they learned anything. It boasted about 5 new enemy types, which could mark a major improvement. First new enemy type I met was the same type of small melee bot the base game featured prominently - except now it can also fly in your face instead of just jumping. Within 5 minutes of starting, I found myself trapped in a small room with dozens of these...

Thanks, but no thanks. I bought Shadow Warrior on a sale, is it any better than this wankery?

 

[adddeed]

Colonial Marines. Not as bad as i expected after reading forums and reviews. The atmosphere and level design are great, more intricate and authentic than AvP2010. Graphics are great, and perfromance is pretty good too. Gameplay is pretty standard, but still fun and challenging. I like that you're always fighting alongside with other marines, AvP2 and 2010 creeped me out because i was always alone. Cutscenes suck though, and the aliens are not as well done as those in 2010. For a 45 metacritic game i'm impressed.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I bought Shadow Warrior on a sale, is it any better than this wankery?

Nope. It's just as bad, if not even worse

 

[Minttunator]

I finally finished ToEE yesterday. I think this game has one of the most enjoyable tactical combat systems I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing in a cRPG!

It's a shame that it was so buggy and rushed on release, like the other Troika games - it's still a bit glitchy even after 10 years of fan patching. The story is also nothing to write home about (no surprise there, being based on a campy 80s D&D module) and the fed-ex quests, especially in Hommlet, got really boring really quickly. I'm going to play the New Content version of the Co8 patch next time, should I go for another playthrough in a couple of years - I hear they added some alternate low-level content to allow people to skip Hommlet.
Still, I really enjoyed it overall because the combat is so fun and I also loved remaking some of my old cheesy D&D characters.

 

[Lemming42]

Being a retard with horrible taste, I want to play one of Bethesda's big open sandbox games. I've tried replaying Morrowind, Fallout 3 and Skyrim recently, skipping Oblivion because I really can't stand it. I've just been getting that thing where you spend like 5 hours installing and browsing mods to make the game less shitty, and then play for 10 mins and quit and uninstall at Balmora/Megaton/Whiterun because you just can't be bothered going through the entire game again. So that only leaves me with F:NV, which I can't play for about another year since I played it to death already.

So the game I'm wasting time on right now is trying to get mods to work together for games I don't want to play.

 

[DwarvenFood]

Playing EYE Divine Supremacy, and having more fun with it than expected. Love the music, artwork and perhaps most of all the spoken language.

 

[Minttunator]

Being a retard with horrible taste, I want to play one of Bethesda's big open sandbox games.

How about an open world game that is not by Bethesda? For instance, have you tried the Gothic games or Risen? Or the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series?

 

[Lemming42]

Being a retard with horrible taste, I want to play one of Bethesda's big open sandbox games.

How about an open world game that is not by Bethesda? For instance, have you tried the Gothic games or Risen? Or the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series?

I love Gothic and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Never played Risen, though, so I'll give it a try. Thanks.

 

[Mebber]

Colonial Marines. Not as bad as i expected after reading forums and reviews. The atmosphere and level design are great, more intricate and authentic than AvP2010. Graphics are great, and perfromance is pretty good too. Gameplay is pretty standard, but still fun and challenging.

Woha, the two of us must live in some sort of weird parallel universes, because this sounds like the exact contrary in every described aspect to the "Colonial Marines" i had the pleasure to play.

Spooky...

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Playing Thief 3 for the first time right now, been discouraged to play it sooner because i've heard so many bad things about it.

Well, it's not as terrible as i've expected it to be. Pretty bad in many parts, yes, but i expected it to be even worse.

Thief 3 isn't bad. The only thing that really sucks about it is the engine. All the levels are divided up into hubs and load times when you move between them takes forever. I just played it for the first time like 6 months ago, so I was using modern hardware and everything, and it still took forever. Other than that, though, it has some really good level design in it. Too bad someone couldn't port the entire game to a different engine (I think it uses Unreal 2 if I remember right).