What game are you wasting time on?

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Back then the squad based RTS was kind of a microgenre that was taking form in something of a reply to mmos and the like. You had stuff like Battle Realms and what would eventually be Warcraft3, plus games like Ground Control and the like. Everyone wanted to show off their 3d graphix.

 

[Kabas]

That explains why Halo 1 levels felt like they were taken from RTS.
First Halo is fun.

 

[Abu Antar]

Only Beta males dislike Alpha Protocol.

It was released 7 years after MGS3, do I need to add more?

It's okay to be a beta male. I don't discriminate.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I've been playing the ambitious OGSR Gunslinger mod for Stalker for about 2 weeks now but it has the most breakable quest design I've ever seen in a mod; literally at least half the new quests will break if you take a break and don't do the tasks in order (usually consisting of 3-5 parts). Very frustrating. It purports to be open world but you're completely cock-blocked from accessing maps needed to progress northward (and finish the mod) until you do several main quests. This was the original structure of Stalker of course but it would have been nice to have seen the mod open all the maps up early like in other stalker mods but you don't dare do that here where most of the new side-quests bug out (see above) and increase the likelihood of breaking the main questline, I'm sure.

But I want to finish this because it is excellent in so many ways and is especially challenging if you play on Master + has several interesting new mechanics and new creatures/variants like poltergeists and the absolutely ball-busting burers from CoP. Other negatives: you can always tell what the mod adds as new missions by the Great Wall Of Fan-Fic Quality Text you're assaulted with when you're presented a new quest by an NPC; at least five full pages (each page requiring 3 pages of scrolling) of texts. Ugh. I think a good mod should probably present this stuff seamlessly

 

[Azalin]

Finished Torchlight II.I got 1&2 pretty cheap on a sale a couple of years ago,tried the first one and dropped it 3-4 hours in since I found it pretty boring and generic. This one is an improvement over the first in most ways.The graphics are better but still they are pretty mediocre even for a game that came out in 2012,the same year as D3 if I remember correctly.They use a cartoony WoW style of graphics to mitigate that issue.The gameplay is solid,nothing spectacular or original but it is enjoyable and they got the basic down. Overall an enjoyable clickfest if you into hack n slash .

 

[Ivan]

15 years ago, RIP

 

[Borelli]

Emperor: Battle for Dune

I never thought about RTS having bad early 3d graphics, Warzone 2100 looks good, Warcraft 3 graphics do not age, Ground Control looked okay
but there is something that just does not sit right with me when it comes to Emperor's graphics, closest comparison would be Caesar 4 the way the buildings fit poorly onto terrain.

A standard C&C game, a 3d version of Dune 2000 basically, although it is a shame it was not on a Tiberian Sun / Red Alert 2 engine. UI and unit readability is bad although some of the units are fun.
I blitzed through the Atreides campaign, Tleilaxu can go fuck themselves.

 

[Puukko]

Played a whole bunch of Ace Combat O4 nearly clearing it twice. It has many standout qualities but is also held back by its relative simplicity and lack of difficulty.

The music consists of one banger after another, and they develop it well to portray the tide of the war turning in the allies' favor. The side story vignettes do a good job depicting a personal war story without it getting in the way of the gameplay. Mission design is solid overall with some standouts like the night time glacier enemy missile hunt.

I do miss some of the gameplay improvements introduced by Project Wingman in particular. Here customization is fairly basic with every plane having the same kind of basic missile and one customizable weapon, either a couple types of air to ground bombs, or multi lock on long range missiles, or a super maneuvrable missile that is almost guaranteed to hit. Which is real handy sometimes because if there's one thing that can be said regarding enemy planes it's that they sure like to dodge. What they don't like to do is hit you unless you fly in a literal straight line through multiple enemy planes. Not once did I die from enemy fire, always from crashing. Even then the lack of manual flares is a shame.

Unfortunately this didn't really change on Expert either, if anything the game was even easier ss I went in with higher end planes and proper map knowledge. I also switched from tourist mode to systematically aiming for maximum points - meeting a point threshold is the goal of most missions, with extra points resulting in a grade above C and thus more money. In most missions I go in with a ground bombing setup first, return to base to restock ammo and possibly switch weapons for aerial combat later. Which is feasible because like I said, enemy planes aren't that threatening and for the most part you can go about your day bombing immobile targets.

There is the Ace difficulty but I have no idea if it'll shake things up at all. I think for most this game is best treated as something to play through once, for a well rounded experience.

I'll also note that the game is rather ugly. They did the correct thing in going for 60 fps, but for an early PS2 title that meant graphics that I can best describe as 'utilitarian.' And I'm upscaling it to 4K with an HD pack that I don't think does much. Ground cover is basic and low resolution and the separation between clouds and the air below is honestly pretty difficult to tell at times, a lot of the time you'll be in a zone of color gradients that all just blend together.

Still this is the type of game where playing it just makes you hunger for more and I do still have several games in the series to try out.