What game are you wasting time on?

[80Maxwell08]

Majesty 2 Collection
I played Majesty 2 before, and was disappointed because it was so similar to Majesty 1 so now i got the Collection to try out the expansions and see are there any new things in them.

Kingmaker and Battles of Ardania- These two expansions are pretty much the same as Majesty 2, new things added are two shorter campaigns, new monsters and a little bit better maps. Also there is one new potion but no new heroes, temples or spells which makes it really boring. In the end i finished them using cheats because the missions got to repetitive.

Monster Kingdom- After getting overthrown you start taking back your kingdom(again) with an army of monsters. All new buildings that produce goblins, ratman, minotaurs, werewolfs and other monster units, that you can level up and upgrade, and all with new spells and abilities. No new enemies, but fighting human heroes of different temples gets tricky sometimes, mostly because monsters tend to flee alot. Monsters have only one temple, the campaign is a bit longer and harder then the other expansions, and the game crashed a couple times and has some other bugs i didnt notice in other expansions. This expansion is slightly better then the original Majesty 2 but only because it adds stuff that were not in Majesty 1, other then that Majesty 1 is still the best Majesty.

I HATE MAJESTY 2 THIS MUCH! It is a blight on gaming, and shouldn't exist. No expension makes it better. Majesty 1 is the only true Majesty.

Yep there's so many stupid problems caused by the way they designed it. The number inflation they put on everything leads to way to many one shotting from your units and the enemiesThe later levels are horrendously designed like the two warring kingdoms you have to stop. Because of the way they designed temples the temple units are several times stronger than any of your other heroes and outclass them in every way. This stupid level sends those enemies to fight you right away.

Then in the Monster Kingdom expansion there's the level where you need to break the super towers you set up in the base game which once again one shot all of your units and have an area of effect on top of being rapid fire. Since you can't control your units they will inevitably walk into them and die right away. The goal is to find the minotaurs and rebuild their temples which gives you a few super strong minotaurs that cost several thousand gold to resurrect if they die. Also at the start of the mission you are being harassed by a couple dozen human enemies which include a few temple units that deal bonus damage to monster units (read ALL of your units) so of course the moment you get the minotaurs they walk by and one shot them.

Playing Majesty 2 is an exercise in frustration since the best way to win is to hit the randomize button and reset if the trading posts aren't close to you. Strategy is pointless compared to just making a ton of units and enemy design is just "more damage more HP". Complete letdown from someone who was a huge fan of the first game.

 

[Metro]

Majesty 2 Collection
I played Majesty 2 before, and was disappointed because it was so similar to Majesty 1 so now i got the Collection to try out the expansions and see are there any new things in them.

Kingmaker and Battles of Ardania- These two expansions are pretty much the same as Majesty 2, new things added are two shorter campaigns, new monsters and a little bit better maps. Also there is one new potion but no new heroes, temples or spells which makes it really boring. In the end i finished them using cheats because the missions got to repetitive.

Monster Kingdom- After getting overthrown you start taking back your kingdom(again) with an army of monsters. All new buildings that produce goblins, ratman, minotaurs, werewolfs and other monster units, that you can level up and upgrade, and all with new spells and abilities. No new enemies, but fighting human heroes of different temples gets tricky sometimes, mostly because monsters tend to flee alot. Monsters have only one temple, the campaign is a bit longer and harder then the other expansions, and the game crashed a couple times and has some other bugs i didnt notice in other expansions. This expansion is slightly better then the original Majesty 2 but only because it adds stuff that were not in Majesty 1, other then that Majesty 1 is still the best Majesty.

I HATE MAJESTY 2 THIS MUCH! It is a blight on gaming, and shouldn't exist. No expension makes it better. Majesty 1 is the only true Majesty.

It's fine. You play worse shit like Broken Age -- now that's a true blight on gaming.

 

[sexbad?]

I'm replaying Half-Life 2. I don't love it like I did the last time I played it, but I'm still having a lot of fun. It really shows how nobody has any fucking ideas anymore. I can't think of any other shooter with this much mechanical variety.

It's also nice to have a main villain whose soliloquies are almost entirely skippable. They just play in the background, and you can listen to them for a bit of world building if you actually choose to.

 

[Sodafish]

It's also nice to have a main villain whose soliloquies are almost entirely skippable. They just play in the background, and you can listen to them for a bit of world building if you actually choose to.

C'mon dude be fair. The latest cawadoody can't possibly have you miss the end product of the 50 million they spent mocapping the villain's every pore in a SUPER AWESOME 1st person cutscene where you can't even control the camera.

 

[circ]

I killed Miraak yesterday. Well really I barely pricked him.

I thought at first I was going to get a somewhat majestic battle. I mean shit, three dragons and one super guy with voice powers against me. Granted I had weapon skills in the 80-90's, armor almost maxed and something. And all indications seemed to indicate atleast some challenge, because Lurkers and Seekers (?) or whatever are kind of tough. But the Miraak battle was probably over in 5 minutes - no reloads required, not a single potion of any kind used. I used elemental fury once but I didn't really need to, and I think I healed with a spell twice. You're the toughest mofo in Apocrypha short of Herma-Mo-Mo exactly how?

No Requiem fangirls, I'm not installing your joke of a mod. Though I'm thinking of retrying next time with Revenge of the Enemies.

 

[dunno lah]

HL2 would've been a lot better if it had a similar variety in weapons and enemies as in HL1.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

civ 4 mods. civ 4 mods everywhere.
rise of mankind, a new dawn, dune wars, master of mana...
it's getting nauseating, but it's the only kind of game which gives all the wide scope and strategy i need.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Managed to fiddle around with Risen to makes staves have damage levels comparable to axes and swords.
Gonna see how that works.
Risen is fun and all but shields make it too easy.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

A small roguelike game that was released earlier this year is Quest of Dungeons. I've been playing with this and it's quite nice. While it has been released it's also still in development, with added content and minor tweaks being released now and again.

The plot is simple, journey into a dungeon to kill the Big Foozle and recover the MacGuffin. You get to choose four character classes, a Warrior, a Wizard, an Assassion (archer) and a Shaman which combines melee with magic. So far I've only tried the Warrior, so I can't comment on the other classes.

Each floor has about 4 different monsters with the option for stronger versions appearing if a Quest requires you to kill one. Boss Encounters can also pop up anytime and anywhere. There are 4 difficulty levels and the game has "Hell" (the hardest one) as the default one.

I've played around 3 hours and already I've had those LOL moments that only roguelikes can deliver. Two examples:

# I start a game, only one door from the starting room, next room is empty, one other door. Open that, Boss Encounter. I'm slaughtered in 4 blows.

# In my longest-running game so far I reach level 5. I quickly find 2 quests to kill 2 named monsters. I proceed a little further and find one of the named monsters, it hits me pretty bad and I need an escape route. In the room is a portal which will send me to another portal on the level. I jump through, only to emerge RIGHT NEXT to the other named monster, which promptly finishes me off.

The biggest gripe I have with the game right now are the thieves. You encounter them on Level 4, they make a "steal" attack, which has a failure chance. But if it succeds, the thief either clears out a whole inventory slot, or steals around 3% of your total gold. Clearing out a whole inventory slot wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that HEALING POTIONS STACK, and it only took a handful of thief monsters for me to have "lost" all my health potions. What's worse, killing the thieves doesn't bring the stuff back. The developer is aware of this and will address this in the next update, which promises to be rather big.

The game's only $5 on Steam, one can do a lot worse than pick up this game.

 

[Peter]

So I went back and finished MGS3. Uncharacteristically good stealth mechanics for the series. Still more "gamey" than the likes of Thief or Splinter Cell, but sufficiently interesting, to the point that I'd recommend it to fans of stealth games who believe the whole "stealth in MGS sucks" thing having played only the prequels. The fight with The End is really fantastic.

Story was meh. The characters are likeable, but the plot is a lot more dull than in 1 or 2. Where the bad writing in those games added to the lulzy, surreal tone, here it's just... bad writing. The game is a lot more tame than the first two, and a lot less interesting for it. And holy shit what a dragged out ending. Chase, boss, chase, boss, chase, chase, escort, etc. Seriously annoying.

Overall pretty good, but I still like MGS2 as a whole package a lot more, even if this one does have better game mechanics.

Now onto MGS1 (played it years ago) and Peace Walker. What has become of me

 

[Servo]

Dishonored finally. Why'd they have to go and ruin it with magical powers? I was actually kind of liking it up to that point...

 

[Crane]

Finished The Samaritan Paradox. Most of the puzzles were ridiculously difficult, like the developers took stupid adventure game logic to its absolute extreme. One of the twists at the end was supposed to be serious,

Spoiler

that Jonatan Bergwall had some sort of incestuous relationship with his daughter, Sara

, but I had a pretty hearty laugh because it was revealed through Jonatan's secret romance novel.

I had to use a walkthrough to complete the game because of the puzzles, but the story made it worth it. A pretty fun little game, but it was too short. The developers should have made less difficult puzzles and a longer game instead of the reverse.

Not to say the story was perfect, the part about weapon shipments out of Sweden seemed tacked-on more than anything.

The voice acting was by far the worst part of the game. I could have done a better job voicing some of the characters. There was also that amateur voice acting mistake of not being able to decide upon one pronunciation of certain words, instead flip-flopping between two or more.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Playing Nethergate: Resurrection and trying to resist the urge to start another Witcher 2 playthrough. All the Witcher 3 hype is really getting to me.

 

[sbb]

Playing Nethergate: Resurrection and trying to resist the urge to start another Witcher 2 playthrough. All the Witcher 3 hype is really getting to me.

How is Nethergate?

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Playing Nethergate: Resurrection and trying to resist the urge to start another Witcher 2 playthrough. All the Witcher 3 hype is really getting to me.

How is Nethergate?

Great. It's 4 person party (or less) and turn based. It plays a lot like the first Avernum trilogy in that sense (it even runs on the same engine), but the style of its magic system is different (more akin to the Geneforges in that there are specific areas of magic that you can specialize in). Its universe is wholly unique, though. It's set in Roman era England, so you can play as either the Celts or the Romans, and each have completely different storylines and start at different areas on the map. Each play differently as well: Romans have access to more melee skills, but less magic, while Celts are the opposite.

That said, it's also a Spiderweb game in the style of Avernum. Which means that it's very grindy (lots of trash mobs) and, unlike the Geneforges, there isn't much C&C. It is a fairly open world, though (which becomes more open in the middle), so while the main storyline is linear, you can wander around quite a bit at the start. I cleared out a few areas exploring and got special items which were later needed in the main quest before I was given the quests, which is neat.

 

[7h30n]

Just finished System Shock. What an incredible game! Took me 18hours according to the end game stats.
Music and sound design + effects are really amazing, it puts many of todays games to shame (and this is back from 1994). This along with environmental detail and good voice acting (paired with really good storytelling) makes for a very captivating and atmospheric game. Looking Glass Technologies really appears to be the best game developer studio.
Next stop System Shock 2. Maybe I should checkout Ultima Underworlds.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Maybe I should checkout Ultima Underworlds.

DOO IT NAO.

 

[Jaesun]

The Shadowgate remake (which I backed on Kickstarter). I am really enjoying this. <3

 

[Machocruz]

Time to retire Project Zomboid for a while. Once you get to a certain point with enough tools, skills, and food sources, there is no more real danger unless you take risks. From that point it's see how much it takes to eat up all edible food on the map until you starve, which could be months of in game time.

What's interesting is that I started with a build of the game where hordes would always gather near my safehouse within a certain period of time, no matter how remote the location was. This was frustrating because I had seen other people able to build up elaborate safehouses, but I couldn't because there was never enough time before tons of zombies showed up at my doorstep. Didn't know at the time these people were playing the next build of the game.

When I started a newer build, I was pleased that I no longer had that problem...for a while. I was able to build a heavily fortified safehouse ,but it became boring because there was nothing to fortify against; the safehouse was too safe. I started pining for a return to the earlier build, which demanded an entirely different, and more interesting from a survival standpoint, approach.

 

[Ulminati]

Time to retire Project Zomboid for a while. Once you get to a certain point with enough tools, skills, and food sources, there is no more real danger unless you take risks. From that point it's see how much it takes to eat up all edible food on the map until you starve, which could be months of in game time.

Or you can head into the wilds near one of the wells and build yourself a self-sustaining walled-off farm. But yeah, Zombocom needs survivors reimplemented something bad.

 

[Machocruz]

Or you can head into the wilds near one of the wells and build yourself a self-sustaining walled-off farm.

My farming was always bugged. After a certain amount of days, I couldn't interact with the crops anymore unless I dug them out and replaced them

 

[CyberWhale]

Just gave up on Freelancer.

Yes, I'm waiting just in front of Freeport 4 (after I was denied to dock) and the game is giving me a mission failure report. The reason? Oh, you've probably already guessed it - stupid design decisions that take away player's control and directly punish him if he even dares to try to use even a slightest bit of imagination or resourcefulness.

So here's how it goes:

My character (named Trent, who is by the way horribly obnoxious) is falsely accused of murder, rape and pilling and is thus forced to flee. Of course, that means he (or I, whatever) needs to go through a lot of trouble conveniently separated into numerous heavily scripted scenarios. After I've suffered through a few of those, I've depleted all of my additional shield batteries and was left only with a single batch of repairing nanobots. I jump through wormhole (or whatever it is) and after I've set a course to Freeport 4 I was shortly thereafter jumped by a dozen or so bounty hunters. Since I'm not properly equipped I get my ass handed to me. And again and again and again.

Being in no mood to repeat the whole mission again I try to do several things:

1. simply cruise by and not stop to even communicate with the bounty hunters - FAIL: my half-retarded asian friend obviously hasn't heard about that tactic or she wants to be gangbanged. Possibly the latter. Still, even if she did follow through with it we still couldn't escape - my ship immediately slows down at that moment (nothing like that happens when you are trying to escape from hostile NPC's while you are freeroaming).

2. find another way or to be more precise go all the way around to avoid those fuckers completely - again, FAIL: although the chick does follow me she also constantly complains about us not going fast enough and when we do reach our destination the game simply refuses to acknowledge it - I guess that not triggering all of the predetermined scripts disables you not only in progressing through the main plot but outright stops you from playing it in any way at all and requires you to load a previous save game.

As if that isn't enough, the game suffers from the following as well:

- uninteresting characters
- same-y side-quests that have to be taken one by one (what, the, fuck)
- very limited customization (can't buy upgrades like additional weapon slots or better engines)
- lack of choice
- unskippable cutscenes (need to watch this annoying shit after every time you die in a story mission)

I mean - really wanted to like this game but even though I'm not against linearity per se some of those horrible design decisions and underdeveloped areas have simply left me cold. The beautiful and colorful backgrounds of the space, the easy-to-use intuitive mouse controls and even those low-poly but smartly crafted graphics were something really appealing, at least to me. Still, those pros are definitely not enough to overlook the above mentioned problems.

TL;DR - fuck Microsoft, fuck Chris Roberts, fuck this game and fuck anyone who says it's great.

P.S. can anyone recommend a similar game that's also noob-friendly and doesn't require a joystick to be properly played, but doesn't suffer from these kind of nerve wrecking faults?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Privateer is a bit old in the tooth, but if you haven't played it to death already I recommend it. Though I gave up on it myself during a story mission where I was supposed to escort some ship.

 

[Kalin]

Try Frontier: First Encounters if you haven't already. It's still great fun, greater than ever, in fact, since new windows-friendly versions come with bugfixes and neat customisation.

 

[7h30n]

Maybe I should checkout Ultima Underworlds.

DOO IT NAO.

So, I got the UU1+2 from gog.
But first I'm gonna try to finish Dishonored. I so much want to like that game but the game is missing that captivating magic found in LGS games :/