What game are you wasting time on?

[Mebber]

Thief 3 isn't bad.

Thief 3 is a mixed bag of some quite good ideas, rather bad executions of said ideas in some cases, and some serious gameplay annoyances.

Examples: The need to household with your stuff and money over the course of the entire game, not just a single mission? Cool! No need to be economical at all because you've looted enough after just a few missions to buy everything you could ever wish for? Boring. Exploring the city, including free looting, buying and selling crap? Great! Exploring a city that never changes a bit, with the exact same loot and guards respawning every night at the exact same location and where there isn't anything left to do after your first visit, turning large parts of the "free nights" into tedious routine? Not so much. Being hunted in the dark by assassin-guys who are supposed to be a real match for your stealth skills? Frightening! These guys wandering around the streets with no caution whatsoever, attacking everyone and being attacked by everyone, resulting in a giant, bloody, noisy mess which somehow even causes everyone who sees you to freak out because they automatically think you're the one responsible for all the shit? Not very good.

And for the gameplay, the controls are sluggish, really sluggish. In a game that takes (or should take) good portions of it's tension from precise, very well-timed movements, that's a pretty bad thing in my opinion. But since the game is pretty easy anyway you don't need good movement control anyway i guess. And while a few maps a quite good, most doesn't even come close in terms of level design quality compared to the predecessors.

Enjoyed the atmosphere, though. Robbing the cradle and spying on the keepers was intense.

I think it's only an average game on it's own terms, and a bad game compared to the other Thief titles. But tastes differ, i guess.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

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.

Install a big overhaul that changes a ton of things at once and let go.

Oblivion -> Oscuro's Overhaul or Francesco's overhaul

FO3 -> Wanderer's Edition or Fook

Skyrim -> SkyRe or Requiem

New Vegas -> Cirosan's Overhaul or Project Nevada

Morrowind -> BTB or Wakim's Game Improvements

 

[AlexOfSpades]

Hard Reset.

What annoyed me the most in Hard Reset was the super-duper creative enemies. We're dealing with a robot uprising and all they could come up with was... a metal ball with legs that explode, and its incredible alternate version: metal ball with legs with a drill on top. What the fuck is this, Megaman? Couldn't they make rampant medic drones that do impromptu heart transplants on you? Frenzied construction bots trying to smash and crush you? Tank-esque military drones thinking you're a communist? Prostitute robots with laser tits? Fuck man anything is better than what we got.

The gameplay is fun however. Havent finished it yet.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Couldn't they make rampant medic drones that do impromptu heart transplants on you? Frenzied construction bots trying to smash and crush you? Tank-esque military drones thinking you're a communist? Prostitute robots with laser tits?

Nope, because that would require a degree of talent and creativity, of which Flying Wild Hog has none

 

[DeepOcean]

Hard Reset.

What annoyed me the most in Hard Reset was the super-duper creative enemies. We're dealing with a robot uprising and all they could come up with was... a metal ball with legs that explode, and its incredible alternate version: metal ball with legs with a drill on top. What the fuck is this, Megaman? Couldn't they make rampant medic drones that do impromptu heart transplants on you? Frenzied construction bots trying to smash and crush you? Tank-esque military drones thinking you're a communist? Prostitute robots with laser tits? Fuck man anything is better than what we got.

The gameplay is fun however. Havent finished it yet.

If this game was made by Painkiller veterans they or forgot how Painkiller was or the competent ones were fired before the production. The gameplay is fun if you compare with things like CoD but nowdays modern developers fail even to copy their previous games.

 

[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.

Install a big overhaul that changes a ton of things at once and let go.

Oblivion -> Oscuro's Overhaul or Francesco's overhaul

FO3 -> Wanderer's Edition or Fook

Skyrim -> SkyRe or Requiem

New Vegas -> Cirosan's Overhaul or Project Nevada

Morrowind -> BTB or Wakim's Game Improvements

Played several Oblivion overhauls and still couldn't really enjoy the game. I really enjoyed Fallout 3 (but not as a fallout game etc) with FWE. I liked Requiem for Skyrim and Project Nevada for New Vegas, too.

I don't think I've ever tried a Morrowind gameplay overhaul, though - I normally just get the full MGSO thing and let it handle everything. So when I inevitably return to Morrowind, I'll try the overhauls you recommended.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Couldn't they make rampant medic drones that do impromptu heart transplants on you? Frenzied construction bots trying to smash and crush you? Tank-esque military drones thinking you're a communist? Prostitute robots with laser tits?

Nope, because that would require a degree of talent and creativity, of which Flying Wild Hog has none

Painkiller was pretty good, why can't they simply replicate those mechanics? I understand Hard Reset can't have as much variety in levels, and that's fine, but surely it wouldn't be that difficult to include more than five enemy types, make the player actually move fast without the stupid sprint key, and make weapons switch a lot faster? These things alone would make Hard Reset a lot more enjoyable.

 

[Daedalos]

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.

 

[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.

Yeah well a fun game is a fun game. I don't nitpick too much. I've played bad games before but this is not it, despite the flaws.

 

[sea]

Finished Broken Age Act 1. Decent adventure game with some likeable characters and story, plus fantastic art, voice acting and animation. But...

• The puzzle design is very simplistic; many puzzles, though highly logical in their design, were things I completed almost incidentally or even accidentally. The only time I ever got stuck was when I forgot to pick up one item I noticed earlier but got distracted by something else, then realized I needed it later. I don't mind the lack of verb items use, but the puzzle construction itself just does not leave that much to the imagination.
• I don't like how items get thrown away immediately after they're used. There's only a tiny handful of items that you ever keep for more than a single task. The problem with this is that instead of using items-as-generic-tools you learn to use in new ways throughout the whole game, they simply become keys for doors that are disposed of once no longer needed. In other words, it's like Doom's "find the red key and use it on the red door" but with a layer of obfuscation. For me, good adventure game puzzles are about how you do something, not what item you use with an object/character/etc. It reduces the puzzles almost entirely down to what's basically a guessing game with only one obvious answer.
• Tim Schafer cannot into tone. He makes a happy-go-lucky/weird fantasy world and then tries to tell a more serious story with Deep & Profound Meaning(MT) in it. It's like if you tried to turn a stranger version of Monkey Island into a touching life lesson. It does not work. Furthermore, it doesn't really hearken back to old-school adventure games enough for me to say it really follows through on the promises made during the Kickstarter campaign.
  
• The story is something I'm feeling very iffy about. The discovery of information is handled well but I'm not sure there is really much of a plot to it, and it seems details are intentionally left ambiguous not because the story is especially complicated or engaging, but simply to create a shallow sense of mystery.
• The world design itself makes no sense. I know it doesn't have to, but going from Baker Town, to Cloud City, to Cabin the Woods, to Sandcastle Land, to Ancient Cult Temple, and having little to no real sense of space between those locations, is very jarring. Adventure games often do a good job at world-building but Broken Age's just feels like a bunch of random ideas tossed together with no real clear link from one to the next.

Overall it's kind of better than I expected, and I can say I did enjoy it for what it was, but it also wasn't exactly fantastic. I'm interested to see where it goes in Act 2 (if Double Fine can even hang on long enough to deliver that), but left feeling fairly underwhelmed considering there are plenty more great adventure games out there today being made on similar or smaller budgets.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Already finished JA: Bitch in Action. Finally. First impression was bad, turned to decent and then in shitfest with enemy patrols raiding my cities. Imagine swarm of enemies that can shoot you at any distance from everything (even pistols or shotguns) and you couldn't fire back because RTwP system is that bad.
I finished last two sectors with trainer and turned on unlimited grenades.

IT'S RAINING MAHN, HALLELUYAH

Hard Reset could be fun if not the screwed movement like jumping or difficult evasion.
Srslly, FPS game where you could run OR shoot (maybe except STALKER) is worthless, drop it to the same box with popamoles.

 

[AW8]

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.

Yeah, Crysis 3 is definitively not as bad as the trainwreck called Crysis 2. There are some somewhat large areas in the latter half of the game, like the map where you drive the car or the one with snipers down by the sea. And while it's still linear as fuck, there are some vents to sneak through for alternate entrances to some rooms.
Cloak mode is indeed too generous. Even worse, the bow - which I actually love, it and its limited amount of special arrows are one of the best things about Crysis 3 - can be fired to score one-hit kills without breaking stealth, making Cloak Mode the most OP ever in the trilogy.

I'm playing Crysis now as well. Crysis is a game that I start up a few times a year to play through any of the game's first half of levels. Cloak mode and the retarded AI makes you practically invincible even on Delta, but the gameplay possibilities and large maps make it a fucking delight to play. This time I've dragged along a trash container over the whole map, hiding in the bush and throwing it to crush unsuspecting North Korean soldiers. Sneaking around, scouting and tagging enemies to hunt never gets old.

I just recently learned that Armor mode replenishes health faster, and that Speed mode lets you aim down the sights faster. I love these different effects from the modes. Of course, Crytek would butcher the suit mode effects and "streamline" the number of them from 4 down to 2 when Crysis was consolized.

So if you're reading this and haven't played Crysis and like to crawl around the jungle preying on hapless North Koreans, I can wholeheartedly recommend the game all the way up to the level "Core". The loading screen to Core is the warning message that "Crytek Presents: Our awesome physics demonstration followed by the extremely linear and waste of good gigabytes endgame" is about to start.

I'm also replaying Half-Life. Except for a few abhorrent design choices (every time you face a chopper, the godawful heavy gun nests, the in-your-face teleported aliens) the game has been brilliant so far. I've only played this game once, 6 years ago, so I barely remember Xen. Time will tell if it'll be a fun experience or not.

 

[adddeed]

Reinstalled Army Men 2. Men of War can fuck off. What a fun game, just as i remembered it. Skirmish against the computer is awesome fun.

 

[AngryEddy]

Just beat Bayonetta + Father Rodin superboss.

The game fucking stinks.

 

[AngryEddy]

I'm thinking about playing Turok and then maybe Turok 2 on an N64 emulator.

 

[FuelBlooded]

Just played God of War on pcsx2. awesome game

 

[Sceptic]

I'm thinking about playing Turok and then maybe Turok 2 on an N64 emulator.

I played the PC ports of these. There's some really good level design in there, surprising for a console FPS (though this was a long time before Halo I guess). I remember enjoying both quite a bit. Third one I played on the N64 emulator and it sucks ass, completely linear, heavily scripted, and very very boring.

 

[Boyarpunk]

Currently playing

Spoiler

Nothing. My mobo died over the weekend.


Good news: great excuse to upgrade again

 

[Carrion]

Mafia 2. I love the first one but never got that excited about the sequel because of the cover shooting. The first game had great, intense combat, but no sign of that here. You can't even crouch while aiming unless you're in cover, so you kind of have to hug boxes and waist-high walls all the time.

The writing's fine, not quite on the same level with the first game but still pretty solid. I'm at Chapter 10 right now, and I like that the story took its time before making you into a full-blown mafia badass. What I don't really like is the stuff you had to do to get to that point. In the first game violence almost always carried some pretty heavy consequences and was not something that could be taken lightly, but here you're killing policemen left and right from the beginning and no one really even mentions it afterwards. Call it ludonarrative dissonance or whatever, but it's kind of jarring when the game tries to maintain a serious and somewhat believeable tone while making you do ridiculous things. A couple of pretty cool missions became immediately "meh" when they turned into yet another unnecessary cover shooting sequence. Then again, the amount of combat probably wouldn't be as big of a problem if it was on the same level as in the first game.

I've still enjoyed it so far, though.

 

[adddeed]

Mafia 2 is a great game, and i enjoyed it as much as the original. Played them both back to back a few months ago, and i'm currently going through the Mafia 2 DLCs. Good times.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

Just beat Bayonetta + Father Rodin superboss.

The game fucking stinks.

You didn't like Bayo? Or is this some sort of next-level sarcasm that I cannot into?

Curious, mainly because you actually played long enough to unlock the secret boss which typically requires a ton of playtime or extreme grinding.

 

[RedScum]

Installed Jagged Alliance 2 with the 1.13 mod once more.

 

[Gregz]

Installed Jagged Alliance 2 with the 1.13 mod once more.

Nice, I like to edit the config files so mercs can't leave your party, and also make militia less costly so you can keep towns you've conquered with ease.

Lots of variations that can be tuned to your liking, explained on the boards:

Bear's Pit Jagged Alliance Forum

 

[AngryEddy]

Just beat Bayonetta + Father Rodin superboss.

The game fucking stinks.

You didn't like Bayo?

Curious, mainly because you actually played long enough to unlock the secret boss which typically requires a ton of playtime or extreme grinding.

Nope. The schizophrenic story was either extremely silly [which I hate] or extremely serious, and not in a good way. I also don't like how the highest difficulty is handled, where one of the core mechanics [which time] is removed. Of course the game is going to be harder when you remove one of the core mechanics, instead of making the enemies really punishing, or giving them more attacks etc.

Also, the grinding is one of the reasons why I dislike the game; it's just a way to artificially inflate the game's average worth. Bayonetta would be a forgettable 8 hour experience, but with the grinding, now it's a longer game. Even Ninja Gaiden allowed you to get to the higher difficulties quickly if you just raped Doku in Chapter 2 or whatever.

Also, Bayonetta is designed around not getting hit, so the bosses and enemies are designed to be incredibly predictable, which I really don't like, because it makes the game that much easier.

 

[Blonsky]

Port Royale 3
Its almost the same game as PR2 but it looks better(well world map and sea battles do, cities and faces look like crap, also loading screen when switching betwen maps sucks).
Buy/sell goods using a slider needs some precision (annoying at start), can set up automatic rutes for convoys and choose the type of trade(profit, prosperity of colonies, acquire goods...) very useful; rank is everything, with a low rank u dont have alot to do, on a higher rank you get alot more quests, buildings, and even buying cities for yourself; battles have an automatic option that sucks (ai dosent know how to use faster ships), pirate convoy just stands next to a city and dosent attack even convoys with no crew, crew=settlers must be careful how much you wana give to city because you need this guys to run the ship.
Has only 2 campaigns and a couple smaller missions later, freeplay mode has a time period option that changes who is a dominant power with most cities under their flag at start (Spain, France, England or Netherland) and some other interesting options that makes it more replayable.

It is as fun as the older PR2 but it has slower ranking and less micromanaging your convoys.