What game are you wasting time on?

[Ulminati]

Try YouTube?

 

[Dux]

Deus Ex GMDX, Pharaoh & Cleopatra, Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty, Torchlight.

I recently finished Caesar 3.

I would have given it top marks if not for those silly market ladies.

 

[Wayward Son]

Currently wasting my time with three games:

• TES Arena:

Pretty good imo. Good dungeon design, good RPG elements, good combat. It's decently difficult (like, not Wizardry's "Imma kill you with your own intestines" level, but you will die, even at a high level as a powerful class like Sorceror. Or maybe I'm just terrible.)

• Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Speaking of difficulty and good RPG mechanics, I recently got the shareware version of this (yay OldGames.sk) I've tried playing into this before, but stopped after my third TPK. Now, however I've played it safer and got to the end of Floor 3 but had to leave due to being out of Latumofises and Dials and party level 7-8. I've still gotten close on multiple occasions to a TPK. If Arena is hard, Wizardry I is brutal. One of the few RPGs that has low level teashmobs you can't just autopilot every time. Can't wait to ce able to check this one off the To Play list.

• DOOM episode 1:

Best shooter I've played in recent times. Great mechanics, hilarious ending, difficult in Wizardry's "Strangle you with your intestines"(TM) way. Maybe just another case of me sucking at games, but I usually take about 20 minutes to do a level that's par is 3, without getting any secrets.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Fuck kleer skeletons men. That is all.

 

[NotAGolfer]

Will pick up Twitcher 3 again today.
Only playing for the story, not caring about exploration or character building at all. Will pick hard difficulty level and not very hard or even more this time, so I don't get annoyed by the shitty item progression and don't have to do any exploring outside of quests.
Will see how it goes.

Deus Ex GMDX, Pharaoh & Cleopatra, Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty, Torchlight.

I recently finished Caesar 3.

I would have given it top marks if not for those silly market ladies.

I loved that game back in the day. The military aspect was fun, despite the retarded AI.
City planning was a nightmare though, Zeus and co. improved on that.
Can't get into playing any of them nowadays though, as I play on 16:9 ratio and none of the widescreen mods I tried really work (something is always cut off).
I wished someone would make a new Caesar game. With a better UI too.

 

[Durandal]

Quake: Scourge of Armagon
it's alright, though too easy at times and not as good as the original (maybe I'm just getting better?)
there's a bit too many traps for my taste (only an asshole level designer spawns Fiends behind you) and the level designers need to calm down with the fucking Vores
the levels themselves are fairly varied, and are pretty fun to play through.
the new scorpion enemy thankfully fires nails instead of hitscan bullets, and they're not that frequent. I wish their attacks were telegraphed, though
the new Gremlins are just thin air, they're not much of a threat, even in large groups. only rarely do they steal your weapon and become a nuisance.
the new laser cannon is pointless too, the Mjolnir I never used
spike mines are fucking pricks on your first run
elevators in this expansion are a fucking bitch to deal with, however


Quake: Dissolution of Eternity
On the whole I like this expac more than SoA, but it has one fatal flaw: the new ammo types
it's impossible to run out of ammo here with all the ammo placed in the maps, on top of there now being two separate ammo pools for rockets and nails
multi rockets trivialize everything from Ogres to Shamblers by being able to kill Death Knights and Ogres in one shot, on top of making Shamblers piss easy to deal with. Lava Nails also melt everything in front of them in case you're in tight quarters, and the enemy opposition does not accommodate your powered up arsenal
there's a flying lich which shoots guaranteed-hit projectiles with even stronger homing capabilities than Vore projectiles, and Ogres which can shoot multi grenades, both of which are not so tough to deal with thanks to multi rockets
the level themselves I like, there's a lot of varied themes and geometry in place, unfortunately its ruined by overly generous ammo placement

 

[Dux]

I loved that game back in the day. The military aspect was fun, despite the retarded AI.
City planning was a nightmare though, Zeus and co. improved on that.
Can't get into playing any of them nowadays though, as I play on 16:9 ratio and none of the widescreen mods I tried really work (something is always cut off).
I wished someone would make a new Caesar game. With a better UI too.

There is information available here which helped me play Caesar 3 on a 16:9 resolution - 1920x1080. It worked quite well and nothing was cut off for me. Of course, not being forced to go through these hotfixes would be swell too. Commandos on Steam recently got a modern touch up, which was extremely nice to see. Completely out of the blue. I hope there's more to come for older games.

Caesar 3 is also that type of game where you have to work around some of its more retarded aspects. If you do that, you can build epic cities - stupid market ladies be damned.

 

[Daemongar]

Playing Evil Islands, which is is Dungeon Seige, stealth, RPG hybrid that is kind of hit or miss. Worth $6, but not really sure if I'll finish the game. You kill enemies and get quests, and use the XPs you earn to upgrade your stats, skills, and spells. One of the most important parts of the game mechanic is the fact that you can't kill or barely harm certain enemies - you have to sneak by them or pickpocket their items, so most quests so far are not all standard fetch quests.

The good:
* Lots of ways to customize your character and play style
* Most quests are not combat, and require sneaking or such to accomplish goals
* Requires some tactics to pick off enemies in a crowd.
* Reload from death is very fast (a blessing.)
* Enemies don't re-spawn, but some quests on the same map may add enemies to certain locations when you return to the map

The meh
* Random crits can really turn events quickly, so backstabbing is huge part of the game
* I just spent most of my money on an upgraded stone dagger which now regularly crits for 0 damage. My old dagger was free and did more damage than the dagger I spent half my money on. Maybe I should have read the instructions...
* Enemies behind you can crit you, so even a few weak enemies can take you down.
* Enemies with ranged weapons run from you. You chase them and burn up all your endurance. They keep attacking then running. You can't. They have unlimited endurance, you don't. Eventually you kill them by catching up to them, but you may chase them all over the map.
* The guy who does your main characters voice: excruciating. Just awful.
* Automated conversations that reflect nothing you would ever say in real life, but accomplish the same goals of getting or turning in a quest. No choices. Must be lost in Russian translation, but complete crap.

The bad
* There are 4 ways of moving: running, walking, sneaking, and crawling. Running drains stamina, but everything else is fucking slow. Painful.
* You have to play for a couple hours before you can actually spend any xps on your character, equip armor you found, create a weapon, or anything.
* You can't equip weapons or armor when doing quests. You can only do this in town. You can't spend XP while on a quest, you can only do that in town.
* No way to break off a fight if it is going bad. You either win or die. Quicksave after every battle is more than a little tiring.
* The start is way too artificially weak. Played 5 hours and still using my starting weapon.
* The frog I was fighting on the first map had 8 hps. On the new map it has 16 hps and is more difficult to hit. I think I see where this is going...
* After playing 5 hours, I had 500 xps. To upgrade STR one point is 320 xps. Something tells me this game is going to be stretched out like crazy.

Summary: I will try to plod through, but it bothers me to no end having enemies I can't defeat and no escape mechanism. They might as well have a turret that blows you up if you get near it. The effect is the same. However, it's a unique approach, so it may grow on me. I'll still give it some time.

 

[octavius]

Strife
Just killed Luzur.

He tried to trick me with his fake German accent.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

You still have Stereotypical Villain and Space Satan left, so keep it up!

 

[Baron Dupek]

I played bunch of old AA tier FPS titles last month, but this time I injected serious popamole poison called Far Cry 3 (thanks to the random user from games deal forum, who gave me this bundle leftover).
Melee is absolutely insane, even more than Dishonored for that matter. Hide behind a corner to cut line of sight with enemy let you stab but doesn't work when "notice bar" is full.
Didn't do all stuff cause I had no patience for this shit.

You can loot bodies manually. Opposite to nuWolf where you need to pick up every gun manually from dead enemies.
Problem is the field where "Press E to loot body" show is p. small. You run around corpse for a moment or longer to find that friggin' point.
Now imagine FPS with high bodycount where you dance around fallen enemies. This is FC3 in a nutshell.
It become redundant when you find that you can repeat shooting challenges and always get money. Good thing I assaulted
enemy posts asap (and radio towers for that matter) to unlock challenges, and saved myself from the hassle.
Main villian is paper copypasta of Tony Montana. How cheap.

Unskippable phone chats every time you load the game.
Heck, the whole game need lot of time to load. Load uWotPlay (program start, do some cloud shit etc.), then game load, do cloud stuff
again and then you can see main menu and load the game.
To start all this you need 5 minutes. Welcome to the XXI century of gaming, son.

Finale is both cringe (emotions of carboard) and ironic (you stab bad guys and then your sex reward stab you so her son can lead her tribe).
And Ubisoft is so stronk they are allowed to include titties and sex (even though nipples are smeared with paint).

 

[octavius]

You still have Stereotypical Villain and Space Satan left, so keep it up!

And now I'm off to see The Programmer. If he's anything like Cleveland Mark Blakemore he's an übermensch that will take all my firepower to take down.

 

[Abu Antar]

Finally got wicked sick in Dota 2. Probably played 1 million games before that. Did decently in most games today, but lost more than I won. I don't know how many games we ended up with one or two players less. I hate this game.

 

[Humppaleka]

Finally got wicked sick in Dota 2. Probably played 1 million games before that. Did decently in most games today, but lost more than I won. I don't know how many games we ended up with one or two players less. I hate this game.

I stopped after 584 hours. I think I was lucky.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

I have been playing Strife a lot recently after buying it on GOG, but I made a few mistakes here during my walkthrough and now don't have enough financial means to stack up on armor, munitions, and medical items. I probably now have to start all over again if I don't want to cheat.

Next on my lists is probably Realms of Haunting which I bought cheap but I wanted to ask here if people know of any good Metroidvania type action-adventure-exploration games on GOG or on Steam.

 

[octavius]

Strife. Blackbird is annoying me with that fake sexy voice. Reminds me of that annoying cunt in Dark Messiah. Can't wait to tastefully pump her full of lead.

 

[vitamin]

Just started playing Fo2 mod - Last Hope. Temple of Trails is much better in this mod than original one. I hope it's going to be really interesting adventure in the Wastelands.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Blackbird is annoying me with that fake sexy voice. Reminds me of that annoying cunt in Dark Messiah. Can't wait to tastefully pump her full of lead.

Play the game right and you get to pump her with whatever you want to...

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Replaying Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire.
I remember I was playing a butchered version back in late 90-s/early 00-s, and after inspecting both PC and N64 versions I've realized that music in PC version is kinda meh.
Now I'm playing the N64 version and boy, this game is way worse than I remember.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

I remember being really impressed by that game at the time when I played it for the first time on the N64.
But when I played it again some time later I honestly wondered what I saw in it in the first place. Dark Forces Jedi Knight was so much better.

 

[octavius]

Yeah, Dark Forces XL version impressed me. Strife Veteran Edition (never played the originals) not so much. Gunplay is weak, the wannabe sexy parrot on my shoulder is annoying, and the level design leaves a bit to be desired.
Cool artwork and setting, though.

 

[baturinsky]

Crysis 1/2/3

First one is your generic modern shooter. Only thing it excel at is that it's a game made in 2007 with graphics better than most 2016 AAA games.

Second is great. They have figured how to make suit abilities UI work. New Yourk setting is great and plot is interesting.

Third has gameplay same as the second, but setting and plot sucks.

Assassin Creed: Syndicate

Great game, but very finiky about graphic card. First thing, it has demanded me to update driver. Then it did run, but at the very minimal settings with crappy textures, because my card only has 2GB memory.

EDIT: Even though game was saying that my card memory is too small for medium textures, I have set them, and it worked fine.

Otherwise, pretty good.

1. Moving vehicles - trains, barges, cabs that you can walk/climb on. Crossing Thames river Frogger-style is fun.
2. Grappling hook cuts down boring parts of the game significiantly. Also, it has allowed to have to-scale streets and buildings that are still navigable by rooftops. This hook is not as cheaty as Batman's hook, but yes, game is quite similar to Arkham games now.
3. Two protagonists with different gender and skills. I like playing action games as chicks mostly for aesthetic purposes, so I like this a lot.

EDIT: If you play Ivy, don't take any health/melee traits, don't upgrade weapons and do missions in places where you are underleveled, it becomes nearly good stealth game.

 

[Blonsky]

Necrovision: Lost company
Expansion of the original game, less maps but they are pretty big and long, new enemies and more different enemies but they added tougher melee enemies besides zombies that suck in a FPS game.
Story is interesting but maps and characters are a bit to similar to the original game and gives me a felling that im replaying the game.

 

[DeepOcean]

Played Medal of Honor Allied Assault because I always were curious to play this game and got reminded of it by Ivan's post, game is linear and have some pretty BS difficulty moments but the gameplay is fast, the variety of missions is great and the shooting is pretty fun with enemies bodies reacting to being shot on different parts on different ways. Medal of Honor is a second world war FPS but it still isn't enterely on the corridor shooter bandwagon, the levels while being linear, they don't feel constricting like artificial stages for explosions and "awesome" shit for you to watch while "playing" like most single player FPS games are today. The focus was mostly still on the shooting and the Dudebro demographic armageddon was still on the infancy.

Medal of Honor had alot of levels but what it is interesting is that one of the worst, the D Day landing level got praised, The D Day level on Medal of Honor is a nightmare of scripting and trying "playing" the designers little movie, it got so much praised on how "cinematic" it was that all FPS that came afterwards were made by people which only dream was to make more grandiose scripted sequences than the D Day landing to the point of the modern FPS games where there isn't a single mission that doesn't try to out do the last one on how scripted and "cinematic" it is. Yeah, people are dumb.

On the polar opposite side in terms of fun was another game I played or more like, tried to play. Watch Dogs... yeah... got it at a discount thinking, hey... Ubisoft is lame but the game is so cheap, why not? I really regret this decision, this game isn't worthy the discounted price I paid. Okay, what is there to do on Watch Dogs? Drive, shoot people and hacking. The problem is that driving is at worst, awful, with cars driving like they were made of styrofoam and spinning like crazy for the slightest provocation, and at best, just mediocre like on every other urban open world out there.

The shooting... most enemies die with a single headshot... weapons are 100% accurate and without recoil like on every popamole game ever... while sometimes the Ai try to flank you when it get close, the problem is that it won't survive that long to manage it if you are a barely functional shooter player. The only fun mechanic there is on the game is hacking, you get a sense of improved mobility and manipulating the enviroment at your favour, there are some cool sections like where you go hacking the cameras of a gang building and go spying the gangers on their shitty lives from the bottom to the top of the building but it doesn't take too long for you to feel this mechanic needed more work and they were stretching a very simple mechanic too far, the hacking on this game while nice it is way too simplistic to carry a whole game. Because shooting is boring, driving is boring and hacking is repetitive and many times , frankly, the game is so easy that manipulating the enviroment feels like some optional shit than something required to win. It is one of the most boring Ubisoft game and that is an achievement.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Currently playing the campaign for Brutal Doom.
I have never been much of a Doom fan (I played them when they were first released back 'then') and always preferred Half Life and Unreal over Doom and the Doom and Quake clones because of the focus on story telling but this is actually pretty good and once again shows you what a couple of motivated and imaginative modders can do with an old engine compared to some of the commercial releases of today.

Man, I would really love to see these guys try to do something with the original Doom Alpha plans before Doom became a more straight forward shooter, or have them remake 'Wolfendoom' (the Doom 'prequel' in the Wolfenstein Engine, not Wolfenstein on the doom engine) for Brutal Doom as I like that game as a 'prequel' and bridge between the classic Wolfenstein games and Doom. (here is a link for those people who don't know about it http://www.areyep.com/RIPandMCS-Wolfendoom-Main.html)
Guess it would be a good reason for myself to start learning how to mod.