What game are you wasting time on?

[Abu Antar]

I've gifted a few copies of it, and I have praised it, but now it is time for me to finish Troubleshooter. I'm playing on hard difficulty, and will keep it that way for the forseeable future.

I am mixing that up with Jagged Alliance 2 (vanilla for a change), and I will be starting up a run of Beyond Divinty. In JA2, I have barely started. In BD, I have reached level 6, so also early on. I will make both characters tanks.

I'm playing some shorter games as palette cleansers.

On console, I am only focusing on Cold Steel 2. I'm 40 hours in, and generally prefer it to the structure of the first game. Hopefully, I can beat it before the end of the year. I want to pack up the PS3. I have basically my whole PS3 library moved to an external HDD, because emulation will be the future way to play those.

 

[Kabas]

I was in a search of a games to play after i failed to launch Dark Messiah on win10.

Alien Shooter 2. A nice isometric shooter that looks better in motion than it looks on screenshots, with secrets to find and some rpg elements. The extra money perk proved to be extremely useful as the shop seems to be the main way of upgrading equipment.
Not a fan of being forced to restart the level if you die. Not like it's easy to die, it's just i lost all desire to continue playing after realisation that i must repeat the level all over again because i left the game mistakenly assuming that the mission was complete.
Edit: Will probably just restart it, wasn't satisyed with my build choice anyway.
Edit2: Scratch that, i actually like my intelligence/money finder build. Found a great implant on sale during a very cool mission in which you get to run over aliens with the police car.

Returned to Warlords Battlecry 2/3 for a bit. I like returning to this one sometimes and screw around in a skirmish or two.

I played a bunch of modern boomer shooters, but not many of the actual boomer shooters. So i started playing Quake for the first time. Gameplay wise it's holding up really well.

 

[The Decline]

I've put in over 100 hours on Skul: The Hero Slayer over the past few weeks. Only reached what I assume is the final boss once. There's a pretty decent jump in difficulty once you hit the 4th level.

 

[YldrE]

I finished Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness.

Imagine you're a game tester and the boss sends you a build: "the real game is secret until release, but we populated the world with some placeholder shit so you can tell us whether dialogues work, quests update properly and shit like that".

Quest, dialogues, encounter design... the entire game has that textbook feeling where a team is completely overwhelmed by the amount of content they have to create within a limited amount of time and everything ends up being minimalistic slapdashed filler.

If I tried to twist it in a positive way I'd say it's clearly a passion project by inexperienced nerds. They got their mind set on creating a Baldur's Gate lookalike and immediately started sperging on the mechanical, which despite a shoestring budget is where the game shines. The areas are large, numerous, varied, with superb artworks for loading screens, the music is nice and fitting, the UI is smooth and approachable, the subsystems have their little subtleties, everything is in place and works as it should, etc.

But after a while it turned out they bit more than they could chew, because they were now faced with the colossal task of creating quests, dialogues and enemy encounters to populate their massive world. When you're a creative type, that's the boring shit you don't want to do... and it shows.

I'm almost sorry to be hard on it because after all it's a pseudo-Baldur that actually got released, functional and bugfree, with a great amount of polish. But a game has to be judged on its merits and you don't get bro points for trying, and on top of that the isometric RPG drought is long over now: Tyranny, Torment, Pillars, Solasta, Kingmaker... they cannot hide behind "yeah it's mediocre but when was the last time we got a large-scale game like this?" when the answer to that question is "yesterday".

The best way to describe the experience would be testing the unpopulated gameworld of a promising game.

 

[Straight elf]

I really enjoyed a playthrough of Pentiment.

 

[Hag]

Getting the fix of Battlefield 1942 I need every couple years. Things have not changed much compared to 2019. Two main servers always very active, a couple on the side including a DC one. Haven't checked it yet, last time it was full of shitty CTF maps, so for now I stay vanilla. Players level is lower than in DC but it's ok for my now-casual level. I do miss Urban Siege and Lost Village servers though. Otherwise community is good. Game stays awesome.
I dig the feeling of familiarity I have with those huge maps. I love seeing the battles still raging on in Berlin or on Wake twenty years later, I love indulging in some hicking in El Alamein or Gazala, knowing every single bump, every road. Nothing has changed much, except for the fact that "baseraping" is now discouraged and no longer a valid tactic. But there are still huge deserts to cross to cap this fucking point and hills to have a good snipe at idiots who run across the deserts and mountains behind to snipe the idiots sniping the other idiots. Tired of sniping ? Get in a jeep and roll over people or grab gun and go for some hot CQB. Zook a plane. Have knife fight in the middle of artillery strikes.

What I value the most is the sandbox map design. Many maps have great spanning landscapes, level geometry is varied and despite the lack of props you can easily hide, escape or infiltrate. No road set for you though, make your own plan. Try something weird. May very well works *.

Maybe it's simply the best explorefag multiplayer FPS ever made.
_________
* Unless of course you're playing Omaha Beach and the like, in which case fat chance, better learn to aim quickly and enjoy it in the meatgrinder.

 

[Denim Destroyer]

I have been replaying Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines which has been fun until reaching the sewers where the rest of the game drops off. Now I am contemplating starting Geneforge Mutagen since I just bought it in the current Steam sale.

 

[SunKing]

I have been replaying Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines which has been fun until reaching the sewers where the rest of the game drops off. Now I am contemplating starting Geneforge Mutagen since I just bought it in the current Steam sale.

Sewers are the worst part of the game. You could always use a cheat to clip through it.

 

[Valestein]

This 3D isometric beat 'em up.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

heh, sewers were one of my favorite parts of VTM... descending deeper and deeper to finally confront the weird queen in its deepest depths.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

Playing some E.Y.E again for shits and giggles with the translation mod. Game's still fucking bonkers but it's more understandable bonkers.

Spoiler

Got the "Mind Gate" or something spell/power this time around, which I've never had before. Used it to hold Rimanah still while I kill him with a med overdose for funsies.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Playing some E.Y.E again for shits and giggles with the translation mod. Game's still fucking bonkers but it's more understandable bonkers.

Spoiler

Got the "Mind Gate" or something spell/power this time around, which I've never had before. Used it to hold Rimanah still while I kill him with a med overdose for funsies.

I have this in my library but nevr played it. You mean the game isn't already translated?! I did not know that. This, and G String are the two big HL2 TCs I wanna play.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

I have this in my library but nevr played it. You mean the game isn't already translated?!

It is, just not very well. Though the game is so weird it's sometimes hard to tell what is a translation issue and what is just the dialogue. Apparently the translation also makes the plot seem slightly different.

 

[Abu Antar]

I came home from a party, and feeling a bit tipsy. Not quite drunk posting, but I've had enough that I have missclicked a few times in Beyond Divinity.

In Jagged Alliance 2, I have brought with me some of the shittier characters to start out with, for some minor extra challenge at the start. Still going vanilla. Might do a modded run, with some research of stuff I haven't used before ,late next year.

 

[Jvegi]

I shat on Dragonfall in the game thread, but after playing it for a while I'm hooked, already looking forward to Hong Kong and planning my next playthrough. The game has some obvious limitations, but makes it easy to look past them.

 

[Kabas]

Finished Alien Shooter 2. Not sure if these are exactly compatible but i wish more diablo-like games had their loot come from either shop or as a reward for finding a secret/exploring.
It made me realise i really dislike seeing mountains of trash items after each battle instead of mountain of corpses. Just standing around for a few seconds after each battle admiring my handiwork, really calming.

 

[Hag]

One hour in the End of Dyeus. It is... underwhelming. Not bad in any way mind you, takes some skills and sometimes brain, doesn't compromise without being punishing, but I'm not convinced by the exploration. Map is well made and full of points of interests, but not really big and it feels more like running in circles to clear everything than really going for a trip in the unknown. Still good, but I hope it opens up a bit. Right now the point seems to be more fights than discovery.

 

[Kabas]

Thinking about trying the first Spellforce game, not sure if i wanna be a wizard or a warrior. Heard that archers suck and that casters will be very weak until expansions.

 

[Lagole Gon]

World of Horror - a game made by a polish dentist.

Playing as the swimming team captain tomboy is pretty much the easy mode.
And I stumbled upon a katana (it means japanese sword) in the otherworld. Cultists had no chance.

Playthroughs with other characters... well... a mixed bag.
Why the fook you want my face? It's not exactly in pristine condition!

 

[Denim Destroyer]

Instead of playing through Geneforge as per my earlier comment, decided to take a complete left turn and play through the Spongebob Battle for Bikini Bottom remake. I rented the original when it was new but never got to complete it. Overall a decent collect-a-thon which would be great for little kids due to the lower difficulty and the pervasiveness of the source material.
Rank nothing too outstanding.

 

[Gibson]

After the recomendation from spekkio in Metroidvania thread, I'm playing Haak.

I'm really having fun, granted I'm a platformer whore, but this game is really hitting the spot, especially with difficulty - not totally casual but also not s&m hard.

 

[Kabas]

Ok, started playing Spellforce Order of Dawn campaign.
Decided to go with pure elementalist and immediately understood why people recommend to go with fighter types. The beginning spells are boring as fuck so far and the micro demand is way too high for what i am getting out if it, plus the aiming systems sucks because for some alien reason you can't target an enemy with your iceburst if he is behind a tree or something.
I am reminded of how warlord battlcry did it spellcasting and how it didn't have any targeted spells aside from the ones that summon buildings, good stuff.
Sincerely hope that i am going to get some interesting spells soon because i am only on my third map and i am already feeling like i wasted too much time on this one.
And it appears to be one of those fantasy games in which your wizard character don't even get to wear a cool pointy hat, lame!

 

[Wunderbar]

It's been ages since I played Gothic games, so i decided to replay the first two before starting Archolos.

Didn't use the smithing exploit and didn't employ any of the metagaming stunts (like knocking out NPCs armed with overpowered weapons, or venturing into ork territory for loot), and despite that I still managed to accumulate 2k pieces of ore and reached level 11 in the first chapter just by doing every sidequest and genociding all low-level critters in the area.

I'm going to join the Swamp camp. Never joined them before cuz they are just a bunch of "lmao dude weed" hippies who live in filth and worship Cthulhu. For a supposedly friendly chill faction they act surprisingly hostile when you try to nap in one of their beds (for some reason their camp is the only one without a free hut to sleep in).

Steam version already has System pack installed, and it runs like a dream right out of the box. Preinstalled patch may piss off some purists, but it wasn't a big deal for me - I would've installed it anyway since the vanilla game had some compatibility issues on modern operating systems. You can opt out of system pack by picking an "original release" option in betas menu.

Spoiler

 

[Kabas]

The first Spellforce ended up being way too slow for me, so i decided to try it's sequel.
On one hand it doesn't take ages to see your dude go from point A to point B anymore, something the first game has in abundance. On the other hand character building system have kinda declined as instead of having to seach for new or upgraded spells your casters now just automatically get them after putting points into a simple skill tree. They also added the auto-attack option for casters and i am not sure what to feel about removal of attribute points.
It's still the same genre of fantasy with scantily clad elven girls i am fond of.

 

[Hag]

On a whim I picked up Death Crown after seeing the screenshots in our prestigious thread. Finished the first campaign in 2.5 hours which is fine for the price I paid (2€ on sale). I would have been disappointed to pay 10 bucks for it, since the game is kind of basic. Not in a bad way, since it works well and the AI gives you a run for your money but the maps are small, the speed fast and the readability awful - I've won many rounds without realizing it since I was too busy clicking like a madman to look at the action.
The art is what makes the game shine, very pleasant and well matched with the music.
Overall it is a good way to sink a couple hours while wrapping your head around the mechanisms. Looks like there is a second campaign, will try later.